


this could be a city

by CherryIce



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Benny Lafitte Lives, Bottom Dean Winchester, Charlie Bradbury Lives, Cuddling & Snuggling, Feelings, Fix-It, Found Family, Glacially Slow Burn, Hunting things and saving people, John Winchester's A+ Parenting, Kevin Tran Lives, LGBTQ Themes, M/M, Mutual Pining, Purgatory, Slow Burn, There's only one (1) bed, Travelogue
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-09
Updated: 2019-12-21
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:33:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 76,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21719980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CherryIce/pseuds/CherryIce
Summary: Benny rides back out of Purgatory in Sam's arm.Dean tries to do better by him. He tries to do better by everyone. Maybe guys like him - maybe guys like them - get to have a home and a family after all.
Relationships: Benny Lafitte/Dean Winchester, Charlie Bradbury & Dean Winchester, Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester
Comments: 124
Kudos: 330





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Many months ago, I set out to write 7k of bedsharing trope fluff to distract from edits on a different fic. This grew far beyond that, as sometimes stories decide their own length. Don't fear - this is completely written, but I'm just putting a final polish on the remaining chapters before posting them.
> 
> This fic wouldn't exist in its current form without support and beta from sweetestdrain, who is really just the best. Thank you also to Killa, for being great and offering travelogue expertise.

“Right,” Dean says, when Naomi and Crowley are both gone, when the blue-white glow of Bobby’s soul has faded from the canopy of the trees swaying above him and Sam. “Let’s go,” he says, turning his back on the clearing and heading back to the car.

“What about the spell?” Sam asks, loping along beside him. “We need to finish the trial.” He’s tensing and releasing his right fist. Reaches into his pocket to pull out the parchment with the rest of the spell on it.

Dean snags it out of Sam’s hand and keeps walking.

“Hey!” Sam yells, tripping on a root before righting himself.

The car —Benny’s body—is about an hour’s hike away, and there’s moonglow now so Dean’s moving quickly. “I’ve got the parchment with the incantation on it. But we’ve seen that weird-ass glow your arms do when you recite it. We’re getting Benny out of you first.”

Sam’s suddenly in front of him. “Dean,” he says, urgently, blocking his way. “What if there’s a time limit?” he asks. “What, then we have to go through this again, but this time Crowley knows we’re coming?” 

Dean starts to push past him, and Sam reaches out to grab his shoulders. There’s dark blood dripping down Sam’s left forearm from where he released Bobby’s soul. There’s a faint, roiling glow visible through the rolled-down plaid covering Sam’s right arm. Dean, staring at it, feels his stomach roil in turn. “Then we’d better get going,” he says.

Sam, silent and judgmental, follows him.

*

“If it was Bobby’s soul we were worried about frying, you wouldn’t think twice,” Dean says.

*

“I’m doing this for you, really,” Dean says. “Who knows what the hell having an extra soul in you when doing the spell would do, anyway.”

*

Sam flexes the arm with Benny’s soul in it as they walk. Dean’s arm smarts with what he at first thinks is sympathy. It’s the span of only a couple of breaths before he realizes it for what it is—the muscle memory of the swing of his machete, coming in to kiss the column of Benny’s neck.

*

The Impala comes into view. Dean, exhausted, breaks into a loping run. Sam follows behind him, more slowly. Dean has the trunk lid propped up by the time Sam gets there. Sam, who had been sullenly silent since they started walking, makes a soft, startled sort of exhale when he sees the carefully wrapped shape in the trunk, the collar of blood. He doesn’t say anything, but he leans into the trunk after Dean, grabbing Benny—grabbing Benny’s body, Benny’s corpse—beneath the knees. Dean slides his arms under Benny’s shoulders, carefully supporting the loose weight of his head through the winding sheets. He’s gentle when he settles Benny to the ground. Stays there for a moment, kneeling on the ground with his hand resting soft on the side of Benny’s face, through the fabric.

Dean breathes. The air smells like Purgatory—moss and trees and blood and death. The grass beneath his knees is softer than anything that grew there. “I killed one of my best friends to save you,” Dean says. He can feel Sam standing behind him, but he’s looking at the arc of Benny’s nose against the sheet. “One of my only friends. I cut off his head. To save you. Does either of us really, seriously think I’ll be able to let you die, slow and violent and painful, for these stupid-ass trials?”

Sam clears his throat. “He - he wasn’t planning on coming back,” Sam says. 

Dean closes his eyes and his fist. Opens his hand to rest across Benny’s neck. The space between his neck and body is so small Dean can’t feel it through the sheet.

“He wanted me to tell you he said goodbye. I told him that he could tell you himself,” Sam says.

Dean’s chin drops to his chest before he inhales again, weight on chest, Purgatory in his lungs, and pushes to his feet. “Thank you,” he says and hugs his brother. Hands him a knife. Stands with his back turned and hands stuffed deep in his pockets. Watches the trees as Sam begins to chant and a flashing red arc casts Dean’s shadow across the grass. Dean stays that way, facing the trees and breathing shallowly until he hears a neck crack and footsteps close behind him. 

When Dean turns, Benny’s close enough to him that Dean barely has a chance to look at his face before he’s wrapping him up in a tight hug. “You made it,” Dean says. 

Benny’s arms tighten around him. “Ain’t nothing in Purgatory that’s been able to stop me yet,” he says. Dean’s head is tucked close enough into his that Dean can see there’s no blood left on his neck, no sign of the decapitation. Dean’s hand tightens in the collar of Benny’s heavy coat, checking. Benny’s arms tighten again, just a fraction. He doesn’t smell like death, just like wool and skin and faintly of the gunpowder-herb-motor oil smell of the Impala’s trunk, and Dean gives himself a couple of breaths to get his face under control before he steps back. It feels like Benny lets go a little reluctantly, but Dean’s not sure if he’s projecting.

Sam has apparently been digging around in the Impala instead of just standing around awkwardly, and he’s found the cooler than Dean grabbed out of Benny’s truck. “Here,” Sam says, holding a blood bag out to Benny like an apology. 

Benny takes it, serious, and nods. “Thank you,” he says.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Dean says.

(There’s another universe out there, where Crowley gets to Kevin before they do. One where Sam came back with only a single soul burning under his skin. There, Sam is weak and shaking after the trial, and it takes twice as long for Dean to haul him back to the Impala as it does for them both to walk. With Sam sleeping restlessly in the front seat, Dean has to bury Benny’s body alone. Dean watches shovelful after shovelful of dirt spread across the winding sheets and obscure the muffled lines of Benny’s face and body. Dean buries Benny in that forest, deep enough that the animals won’t get him, marks the grave well so that if—when—they pull Benny’s soul out of Purgatory again, he’s right there and easy to find. Dean takes a minute, or an hour, when the last shovelful of dirt is in place, to stand there and breathe in the dirt-moss-death smell of Purgatory. Eventually, he follows the sound of water until he reaches a creek. He washes his hands in the water, dark soil running into the current. Sam’s still sleeping when Dean gets back to the car. Dean sits there, hands on the wheel. In the moonlight, the dirt left beneath his nails looks like blood. _Dean?_ Sam asks eventually, sleepily, and Dean carefully puts his face back together and starts the car.)

*

It’s well into the next day before they hit the bunker. The kind of long, broad sunrise you only get in the prairies is starting to paint the Kansas sky in vivid relief. In the rearview mirror, Dean can see Benny watching it hungrily out the window. Kevin is watching it too, but Dean’s eyes have been drifting back to Benny for most of the drive. There’s not enough sun to give Benny any problems yet, and he’s watching the purples and oranges like a man who thought he might never see anything other than gray and black again. Dean’s foot drops on the accelerator and the Impala surges through the early morning light.

The garage is cool and silent as the ticking of the motor tapers off. It’s a moment of peace before everyone starts moving. It feels like there are far more than four people milling around the car. Dean, exhausted, stares into the trunk, at his bag in the corner and the machete he used to take Benny’s head off. He seriously considers just crawling back into the Impala and sleeping there. It wouldn’t be the first time or the last.

“Come on,” Sam says. “We’ll deal with it tomorrow.” He moves Dean’s hands and lets the trunk slam closed. Kevin, tweaking, jumps and spins at the sound. Sam sighs. “I’ll take care of that for now.”

“Yeah,” Dean says, and “okay,” as Sam leads Kevin off. When Dean turns around, Benny is standing there awkwardly. Dean’s not sure if he’s ever seen Benny look awkward. He always occupies the space he stands in, even if he’s uncertain. “Come on,” Dean says and trusts Benny will follow him. He can hear Benny trailing behind him, through the long hallways, through the library and the kitchen. Dean, who’s been up for almost three days, who’s never really had a home to bring someone back to, absently wonders what Benny sees when he looks around. Now that the adrenaline is draining out of him, now that he’s out of Baby, every step takes him further into a fog. He’s been at this stage of exhaustion too many times before, and his limbs are about to stop obeying him.

“Pick a room,” Dean says, finally, gesturing up and down the hall. “This one’s mine. Sam and Kevin are around the corner. Cas is a couple of doors down. You’re going to have to deal with it as-is tonight. If I try to make up a fresh bed for you, I will 100% fall asleep partway through. The joy of fresh sheets will not make up for the presence of a snoring hunter in your bed.”

Benny’s face goes through a complicated series of expressions that Dean’s far too tired to parse. “Wherever you want me is fine,” Benny says, finally, slowly. “I’ll be out of your hair in the morning.”

Dean, partway through his door, whips back around. “No,” he says. Points clumsily. “You’re gum,” he says. As predicted, his traitor body is starting to betray him to sleep.

Benny looks at him in confusion. “I need to be scraped off the bottom of your shoe?” he asks, slowly. “I need to be chewed up and spat out?”

“No,” Dean says. The door frame is supporting most of his weight. “Hair. Gum in your hair. What happens if you get gum in your hair? It stays.”

Benny laughs. “Okay, brother,” he says. “You going to be okay to make it the ten or so feet to your bed?”

“I’m fine,” Dean says, with as much dignity as he can muster. It slurs a little coming out, so it’s not much dignity.

“I believe you,” Benny says, slipping under Dean’s arm to stabilize him as he makes his way to his bed. “It’s been a long day for all of us,” Benny says, like Dean’s done anything other than swing a machete and drive a car and stroll through a forest and not die. He works Dean’s boots off of his feet, pulling off his coat and overshirt and looking strangely at the blood on the cuffs of his plaid.

“Uh-huh,” Dean says, as his face hits the pillow. It smells like home. It’s weird to him that home has a smell. “Hey,” he says, reaching out blindly to catch at one of the hands pulling a blanket over him. “Hey,” he says again, pinky tangled with one of Benny’s, “you’re going to be here when I wake up?”

Benny sighs. “I promise, cher,” he says, making no move to detangle his hand from Dean’s before Dean drifts off to sleep.

*

Dean wakes up, warm and comfortable and alone. There’s an extra blanket on top of him, and when he reaches out in the dark he finds a bottle of water and a piece of paper. He’s disoriented in the way he only ever is after a long, deep, motionless sleep. He fumbles the light on. _Still here_ , the note says in unfamiliar, ornate cursive. Dean sits on the edge of the bed and scrubs his hands over his face. There’s a fine trace of blood across his t-shirt. Half-awake, he wonders for a moment where it could have come from, before reality comes crashing down.

 _Still here_ , the note reminds him.

Robe belted, Dean wanders out into the hall and follows the sound of distant voices and the smell of food into the kitchen. Everyone else is gathered there. Kevin’s fully dressed. Sam’s wearing his pajamas and nursing a beer. Benny’s making omelets. Dean exhales, then realizes he has no idea what time it is. The clock says 9, but he can’t tell if it’s morning or night.

“Hey,” Benny says, low and easy. Dean fights the urge to poke him just to make sure he’s real. Dean sits down at the table instead, glaring suspiciously at Sam and Kevin. Sam raises his hands placatingly. Kevin already has a plate in front of him, and Benny reaches past Dean to hand one to Sam.

“Thanks,” Sam says, almost formally polite.

Dean rolls his eyes. Benny moves back to the counter and starts chopping something.

“Hey! You going to ask how I want mine?” Dean calls out. 

“No,” Benny says, and starts throwing vegetables into the pan. “Because I don’t want your heart attack on my conscience.”

“No rabbit food,” Dean grumbles but takes the omelet Benny puts in front of him despite the non-meat colors folded inside it. He focuses on the food and tries very hard not to think about how fucked up it is that he killed Benny yesterday—or probably yesterday, he should really figure out how long he was asleep—and now Benny’s feeding him.

Benny drops down into a chair beside Dean, same thing on his plate he’s feeding Dean. He tucks in. He might not need food, but he appreciates the taste. For a while, the only noise is the background hum of the bunker and the clink of silverware on plates.

“So, you’re a vampire?” Kevin asks. “This is really good, by the way.”

Dean freezes a bit. Sam looks like he can’t figure out how he wants to feel about the question or the answer.

“Is that going to be a problem?” Dean asks, wary.

Kevin shrugs. “You going to bite me?” he asks Benny directly.

Benny laughs, low and deep. “Stringy little thing like you, all full of caffeine and amphetamines? Nah. I’m on the wagon, don’t worry.”

“Okay,” Kevin says. “Cool.”

Sam flails a bit. “Wait,” he says. “That’s it?”

“Castiel makes out with a demon sometimes,” Kevin says. “I thought this was just how we roll.”

*

Dean makes up the bed. (It’s more complicated than the weight carried in those five words, of course. He runs sheets through the ancient washer and dryer, peers at the distribution of dust in the bedrooms down the hall before swallowing hard and considering the possibility that Benny either didn’t sleep or spent the night sitting beside him. He grabs Benny’s beat to-shit duffel bag, the one he’d liberated from Benny’s beat to-shit truck, out of the trunk of the Impala.)

Dean makes up the bed. He feels the weight of eyes on the back of his head as he wrestles the last corner of the fitted sheet in place. “What?” he asks, letting the mattress thump back down to the bed frame. Inhales fabric softener and softens his tone. “What’s up, Sammy?”

Sam’s looking around the room with an expression that Dean can’t read. Sam hasn’t said anything about the trials since they got back almost two days ago. Dean had slept for fifteen hours, almost twice what he can remember ever getting in one go, and now finds himself by turns achingly clear-headed and disoriented in an overslept-fog.

Sam’s eyes stop sweeping the room, settle on Dean, standing by the bed with its fitted sheet. “Where’s Benny?” he asks, and his tone is mild, but Dean still feels his hackles rise.

“Getting some fresh air,” Dean says, trying to figure out which way the top sheet goes.

“He staying?” Sam asks. 

Dean, tucking in the sheet, doesn’t answer. 

“Right,” Sam says. “Better question. How long is he staying?”

Dean huffs and tries to get the sheet to lie flat. “Long as he wants,” he says. It’s not that Dean is bad at changing sheets, but he hasn’t had much call to learn. He’s spent most of his life out of hotels and abandoned houses and the backseat of his car. He and Lisa used to do it together, a small ritual, light streaming in through the windows and sheets ballooning up between them meaning something to him that he could never manage to articulate. Dean puts one blanket on the bed and then another because fuck if he knows how many blankets a vampire needs. Does the lower body temperature mean he needs more or less? “Look. I know you don’t get it,” Dean says. Sits down on the mattress and starts shoving pillows into pillowcases. 

“You’re right,” Sam says. “I don’t get it. Look—he’s not what I thought.”

Dean thinks about making the bed with Lisa. He thinks about making the bed with Lisa while Sam was dead. While he thought that Sam was dead. _I told Benny I was going to do better by him,_ Dean wants to say. 

“But he still—he killed Martin.”

Dean exhales. “Maybe Martin needed killing,” he says. Fights the urge to rub at his wrists. Martin kidnapped and terrorized Elizabeth; Martin held a blade to her throat and made her bleed. Benny took out a vamp who needed killing; Benny walked away from the blood on Elizabeth, on Dean, with little more than a steadying breath. Dean’s been a vampire. He knows how hard that is.

Sam, still standing in the doorway, crosses his arms when Dean doesn’t say anything further. “Even if we assume that’s true—Dean, he’s still a vampire. He can’t stay here.”

Dean inhales. Puts the pillow down on the bed. “He saved your life,” Dean reminds him. His fingers tighten and release in the blankets. _If I’d known Benny wasn’t planning on coming back, I don’t know what I would have done,_ Dean thinks with sudden clarity. (He’s not sure if this is a lie, but he knows that at the very least, he would have made Benny promise he was coming back.) “He saved your life,” Dean repeats. “He saved Bobby’s soul from hell.”

“Lot of people have saved my life,” Sam says. “Don’t remember inviting all of them to move in with me.”

“Maybe we should,” Dean says.

“Dean,” Sam says, frustration clear in his voice. He has this look on his face, one that always sets Dean on edge, like Sam is the reasonable one about to speak truths Dean’s too dense to see. “Dean, I live here too. I get a say in whether or not I want a vampire living with me.”

Dean exhales. “He didn’t actually ask to be turned,” Dean says. “It’s not like he had a say in the matter.” And then, because Dean isn’t above a low blow, and because Dean can still feel the handle of the machete cool against his palm and see Benny’s head separate from his body: “Believe me, I know what it feels like to get your neck ripped open, have someone else’s blood dripped down your throat. But you know what that last part feels like, don’t you, Sam? Someone else’s blood in your teeth and running warm down your throat? You jealous?”

The room is absolutely, completely quiet. Neither of them even breathe. 

“Jesus, Dean,” Sam says, eventually. He looks worse than he ever has when Dean’s punched him. “That’s low.”

Dean shrugs. “Yeah, well, so is knocking me out and handcuffing me to a radiator.”

Sam doesn’t say anything. Just turns and walks away. 

Dean sits there on the bed, heart jackhammering, for how long he can’t say. Eventually, he scrubs his hands over his face and stands, grabbing Benny’s duffle from the foot of the bed. He unpacks the bag mechanically, carefully laying the mended and neatly folded clothes into a drawer that dwarfs them.

*

Dean finds Benny outside. He’s standing stock still and staring at the moon and stars. Wild grass sways in the breeze, brushing against his thighs. Dean wonders if Benny can hear each individual blade and stalk and head as it bends and sways, gliding and rasping against its neighbor. He wonders if Benny can hear the way Dean’s heart thumped unsteadily until Dean saw him, the way his breathing evened out when he saw Benny standing, hale and whole.

“Hey,” Dean says, picking his way carefully through the uneven ground. 

“Hey yourself,” Benny says, leaving Dean waiting for—he’s not sure. Benny to call him chief, or brother, or—Dean’s not sure, so he stands there next to Benny, staring up at the sky.

“How many more stars can you see?” Dean asks. “With that vamp eyesight of yours.”

Benny huffs a quiet laugh. “Not as many as you’d think. Not as many as I used to see when I was a child. Light pollution. Everything’s got a side effect.”

Benny looks so at home there, silent in the moonlight and undulating waves of grass that it takes Dean utterly by surprise how lost his eyes are. Dean thinks that if he were Sam there’d probably be something he could say or do to make Benny feel found. Instead, he shrugs and clasps a hand to Benny’s shoulder. “Progress isn’t all bad. I’ll trade a few stars for indoor plumbing and 24/7 access to internet porn.”

Benny laughs, loud and sudden, like he didn’t expect to feel it bubbling out of him. It vibrates up Dean’s arm. “You got me there, chief.”

“Come on,” Dean says. He thinks about how close he came to never feeling the rumble of Benny’s laugh again. His hand on Benny’s shoulder curls involuntarily, fabric free of blood twisting beneath his fingers, knuckles curling to brush against the nape of Benny’s neck. Dean slides his hand on Benny’s shoulder across his back and uses it to pull him back towards the bunker. “Got a room set up for you. Experience the best modern amenities an abandoned dead-guy bunker has to offer.”

Benny stiffens a bit, but Dean keeps pulling him along. “How’s Sam feel about this?” Benny asks.

Dean huffs. “Sam will learn to deal.” (Sam’s being a bitch about it, but he’ll learn to deal.)

“He’s your brother,” Benny says. “I’m not —”

Dean keeps walking. “You saved his life. You say you’re not worth it, and I’m going to kick your ass.”

Benny stops, abruptly. Dean loses contact. Benny stands there, woodenly. “Let’s be realistic here,” Benny says.

Dean crosses his arms. “You just piggybacked your soul out of freaking Purgatory in my brother’s arm. We crossed realistic a long time ago.”

Benny looks lost again. “Dean—” 

“No.” Dean’s gaze hardens and he steps up to Benny again. Pokes him in the chest. Benny looks surprised. Dean’s smile shows teeth. “Look. I told you I was going to do better by you, and this is the best I know how to do, so you’re just going to have to deal with it. Okay?”

Benny looks—not quite confused, but something, and at least it’s not lost. “Anyone else get any say in any of this?”

“No,” Dean says, and Benny looks—a lot of expressions flash across his face, but in the end, he smiles. “Okay,” he says.

Dean can feel Benny following him back inside, but the part of his brain that lives in lore is afraid to look back. His spine unwinds when he hears Benny’s steps behind him on the concrete floors.

*

The thing about Purgatory—one of the things about Purgatory, about it being pure, was just how it stripped everything down, stripped everything away.

_Hunt._

Everything else was secondary, even killing. You kill because that’s how the hunt ends. 

Integrating back into the world after Purgatory was—is—was an entirely different thing than coming back after Hell. It’s not—Dean wouldn’t say it’s harder, because it’s not. Purgatory was calm, almost, after Hell. Meditative, almost, like his life but with all the bullshit, all the pretense, everything about people stripped away. Monsters fell on him as easy as breathing, and he didn’t have to check if they were good or bad or human before taking them out. Everything in Purgatory was a monster, including him. 

( _You took_ hunt _and decided to make it about saving the angel _, a voice that sounds like Benny’s says. _How many of the monsters there were like Benny? _a voice that sounds too much like Dean’s own asks.)____

____Coming back from Hell was literally coming back from Hell. Coming back from Purgatory was like walking from one version of his life into another. In Purgatory, he wasn’t—he wasn’t in someone’s hands, someone’s web. Purgatory stripped away every need other than the hunt, same way it stripped away bloodthirst and the need for human hearts, or it would have just been a dimension of monsters slowly starving to death. It pared him back to the bone._ _ _ _

____Yeah, being back on Earth means there are more colors, at least in the day. But he’s still hunting. He forgets, sometimes, that he has to eat now. That he has to sleep. Dean trained himself young to ignore the hollowed-out feel of not having eaten for days, when Dad was on a hunting trip and they were out of money and Sammy needed food. His body has rarely felt hunger properly since then, permanently caught somewhere between ignoring the gaping, growling hole in the center of him and never quite being able to fill it._ _ _ _

____Sleep’s a little the same. You sleep too deep, and you might not hear something scratching at the motel room door, looking for your little brother. You never stay anywhere long enough for your brain to work out which noises are normal and what’s a monster, and there’s always a monster coming after you._ _ _ _

____Sleep after Hell was harder, with the things he’d found out he’s capable of, the things he’s done and had done to him scratching at the back of his eyes. Pushing himself until his body took him down so deep he had no choice. It’s different yet after Purgatory, his brain knowing it still needs sleep but his body remembering that he can live without it for months, years._ _ _ _

____Of the things he misses about Purgatory, not having to sleep is right up there._ _ _ _

______ _ _

*

Dean hates Djinn.

*

“I think I actually prefer these bastard off-shoot Djinns,” Dean tells Charlie.

“Really?” Charlie asks. Staring out the window of the Impala at the hospital in front of them. “You prefer a nightmare to a dream? That’s—I mean, it’s telling.”

Dean drums his hands on the steering “Hear me out—yeah, getting stuck in a nightmare loop of facing your worst fears sucks, but nightmares are supposed to suck, right? A normal Djinn gives you everything you ever wanted and then shows you how shitty and useless you’d be at it.”

Charlie wrinkles her nose at him. “I don’t think you understand how good dreams work.”

Dean shrugs. “I understand how Djinn work.”

“Okay,” Charlie says. Takes a deep breath. Looks at the hospital where her mother is lying dreamless. “Time to wake up.”

Dean gets out of the car when she does. Hugs her—lets her hug him for as long as she seems to need.

“I love you,” she tells his shoulder.

“I know,” he says, and she laughs, wetly.

“Okay,” she says again, finally. Smooths her hair as she steps back. Takes a deep breath. “Later, gator.”

Dean leans against Baby’s front hood and watches Charlie walk into the hospital. Her back is straight but her steps are small. Dean exhales and looks up at the sunny sky above him. It’s not really fair that it’s that nice of a day, he thinks. That the air is so clear and there are birds singing. It should be gray and dreary, threatening rain. He stands there, feeling the warmth of the sun on the hood through his jeans. Instead of getting in his car and burning rubber back to Lebanon, he pulls out his phone. Calls Sam. “Just wrapping up here,” he says. “Everything okay?”

Sam huffs. “Everyone still has their heads.”

Dean exhales through his nose. “Kevin’s not still tweaking? You still hacking?”

Sam’s response is slower this time. “Yeah,” he says. He sounds tired. “Kevin’s getting better. I’m doing okay. Benny’s keeping to himself.”

“Right,” Dean says, and: “couple of loose ends to wrap up here,” because it sounds like he can spare a minute. “I’ll let you know when I’m heading out.”

“Yeah,” Sam says, and “okay,” and “see you when you get back.”

“See you soon,” Dean says, biting back _everyone better still be alive when I get home_ , and hangs up. He stares at Benny’s number in his phone and tries to figure out if Sam will take him calling Benny the wrong (or right) way. “Fuck it,” Dean finally says, staring at the hospital, and hits call. 

Benny picks up on the first ring because he missed the point in society that trained people out of seeming too eager to hear from someone. 

“Hey,” Dean says, drumming the fingers of his free hand on the hood.

“Hey there, yourself, Dean,” Benny replies.

“Hey,” Dean says again, staring at the hospital and feeling the warmth from the long, broad way Benny says his name. “Charlie’s got a thing,” he says. “I just want to stay and make sure she’s okay. You gonna be—"

“I’ll be all right,” Benny says. There’s a soft pause, and Dean hears a radio playing in the background. “You look after your friend.”

 _I’m trying to do better at that_ , Dean thinks. “You need me to grab you anything?” he offers. “I’m at a hospital anyway.”

“Nah, your brother already took care of that. Very pointedly installed a minifridge in my room.” Benny laughs. “Didn’t know anyone could put that much meaning into plugging in a cord.”

“Sorry about that,” Dean says.

“Can’t say as I blame him,” Benny says.

Dean scoffs. “You haven’t seen some of the potion concoctions Kevin’s stored in the fridge.”

“It’s fine, Dean,” Benny says, and “I’m fine.”

“Right,” Dean says. Feels the sun on his face and the slow warmth in his throat. Looks at the hospital and sighs.

“You look after your friend, now,” Benny says.

Dean nods. “I’ll see you soon,” he says, and hangs up.

Dean settles onto a long bench in the hospital hallway. It’s padded, if barely, which puts it head and tails above the standard hard plastic chairs. It’s not that Dean doesn’t get it, needing furniture that’s easy to clean and can stand up to fits of rage and innumerable anxious family members, but he’s spent enough time in hospitals to know that the physical discomfort of waiting areas adds another level of shittiness to the entire experience. 

Look at what a princess he’s turned into, Dean thinks absently. At home he’s got the most comfortable mattress he’s ever slept on, and it’s his, and it’s still hard for him to fall asleep.

The hospital hallway he’s sitting in is long-term care, so it lacks the hustle and bustle of emergency, of other wings. It’s quiet, voices carrying down the tiles of two nurses talking in hushed tones at the end of the hall. He crosses his arms and his legs and settles lower on the bench, counting ceiling tiles and different colors of floor tiles and sending out the occasional prayer to Cas, same as he’s been doing for weeks. Hey buddy, not doing the trials thing anymore, come home.

Dean’s starting to get Pavlovian cravings for hospital-terrible coffee by the time Charlie and a woman in a doctor’s coat step out of a room down the hall. Their voices are low enough that Dean can’t hear them. Charlie wearily drops her coat and bags to the floor. Her back is to him so he can’t see her face, but he knows what it will look like from his own reflection in the mirror, after John. Dean knows how this conversation goes, and he leans his elbows on his thighs and rubs his hands together in sympathy. The doctor and Charlie talk for a few more minutes before she touches Charlie on the arm, gently. Dean gets up and heads toward them.

“Is there anyone you can call to take you home?” the doctor is asking.

“I’m fine,” Charlie says.

“I’ve got her,” Dean says.

Charlie turns to look at him, face heavy and eyes dry and red, and he can see that it takes her a second to place him. “Dean?” she asks, surprised.

“Let’s get you home,” Dean says, the doctor waiting until Charlie nods at her that everything is as okay as it can be.

Dean opens his arms and raises an eyebrow because he’s honestly not sure what she wants right now. She picks up her stuff, cradling it to her stomach, and lets Dean put his arm over her shoulders as they walk.

She’s silent the entire way back to her motel. Dean pulls into the parking lot and they sit there, quietly. Charlie pulled a copy of The Hobbit out of her bag at some point during the drive, and she’s running her fingers along the spine absently. Her shoulders are hunched but steady. “You going to try to make me talk?” she asks, finally.

“Me?” Dean asks. “God, no.”

“Right,” Charlie says. Huffs a little. Turns the book over and over and over in her hands. “What was I thinking?”

“I’m here if you want to, though,” Dean says. “You’ve read the books so you know—my relationship with my parents was complicated in an entirely different way than yours was, but—” he releases his white-knuckle grip on the steering wheel, runs his hand across the dashboard. “I took Baby to pieces after Dad died. If Bobby and Sam hadn’t been there—”

Charlie shakes her head. “I need to do this alone.”

“Okay,” Dean says. “But I have a question for you. Do you? Do you have to do it alone, or do you just think that you have to?”

Charlie exhales wetly. “I don’t know,” she says. “I’ve been on my own for so long.”

“I wouldn’t know what that’s like,” Dean says, “but—”

“Yeah, you know,” Charlie says.

Dean shrugs. “You attached to this motel room?” he asks.

“It’s a motel room,” Charlie sniffs.

“Look,” Dean says. “I had this whole thing I was going to say about how we could use help with wifi in the bunker, and how we had all these lore and magic resources, but the truth is—yeah, we have books, but you’ve got your head on straight; and for whatever reason, the wifi works. But Charlie—you don’t have to be alone.”

Charlie half laughs, half cries. “Not exactly great company at the moment,” she says.

“You don’t have to be,” Dean says. “It’s a big bunker. Plenty of space if you just want to get lost somewhere and be alone. Have your space. But you don’t have to be by yourself. I’m not—I’m not saying that you have to uproot your life and move in with us forever. But you don’t have to be alone if you don’t want to.”

Charlie’s hands flex and relax along the spine of the book. She tilts her head back to look at the roof. There’s a tear slowly making its way from the corner of her eye and she blinks furiously. Dean reaches out for her and stops, pulls back, giving her space and time. She fights to keep her breathing steady. “Don’t want to cramp your style,” she says.

Dean laughs. “Bold of you to assume we have style to cramp,” he says. Pauses. “I’ve never really had a home, before,” Dean tells her. “But you—you read the books, so you know that.” He stops. Tries to figure out something to tell her that the books wouldn’t have. Chuck glossed over a lot of things. Glossed over a lot of John Winchester. “I spent three months at a group home when I was a teenager, and honestly, that was the best time I ever had growing up. So I—I don’t know what it was like for you, to lose your home. And I’m not trying to replace it. I just want you to know,” Dean says. “That you could have a place to come back to. If you wanted.”

Charlie scrubs her hands over her face. Wipes the sleeve of her hoodie across her eyes. “Okay,” she says.

“Yeah?” Dean asks.

“For now,” Charlie says, voice firm, eyes red, poking him in the chest. “For now.”

“One day at a time,” Dean says, and then, in a long exhale, “thank god. You have no idea how much I’ve been wanting a buffer between Sam and Benny.”

Charlie punches him in the arm. “Knew you just wanted to take advantage of my sparkling wit and conversational acumen.”

“Definitely,” Dean says, and follows her across the parking lot.

“Just for that, you’re carrying all my stuff,” she calls back across her shoulder.

*

“Objectively,” Charlie says, sitting on her unmade bed and looking at the passports in her hands, “Objectively, I know that she’s been gone for—that she’s been gone for years. She hasn’t been my mother for—”

Dean, folding sweaters and tucking them into a backpack with the kind of muscle memory that only a life lived on the road gives you, nods.

“Objectively,” Charlie says, “I know that I didn’t kill my mother.”

When Dean is finished with the sweaters, there’s still plenty of room left on the top, so he starts throwing in books as Charlie nods yes or no to them. “Objectively doesn’t mean shit,” Dean says. “I know all kinds of things I don’t believe.”

“One day at a time, huh,” Charlie says.

Dean closes the backpack over the last of the books Charlie nodded yes at. He fiddles with the zipper pull. Swallows around something in his throat. “I killed Benny the other week,” he says. “Cut off his head. Objectively, I know it turned out. I know he’s alive again now, for values of ‘alive’ that include undead. Objectively —”

“Yeah,” Charlie says, and, softer, “yeah,” pulling at Dean’s wrist until he sits down beside her on the rumpled sheets and she can drop her head to his shoulder.

*

“Okay,” Charlie says. “That looks like it’s everything.”

Dean looks around and nods. Charlie’d tried to renege on making him carry all her stuff, but honestly, there hadn’t been much of it. 

“You’re probably tired,” Dean says.

Charlie nods. “I don’t want to be rude, but—”

“Long few days,” Dean says. Wraps her up in a hug, and kisses her forehead and waits for her to let go. “I’m down the hall if you need anything,” he says. 

It’d taken a couple of days to get everything wrapped up, and the bunker was empty when they got back. Sam and Kevin were on a ghost thing, and Benny was—was somewhere, and Dean fought the lurch in his stomach.

Dean stops outside his room and turns across the hall to Benny’s. He pushes the door open, just a bit, just double checking that Benny’s stuff is still there. Small things have appeared in Benny’s room in the weeks since—since he helped get Sam out of Purgatory. An old fashioned radio, a coat rack. An ever-growing stack of history books piled up against the mini-fridge. Dean stands at the door to Benny’s room and feels a little hollow at how few pieces of clothing he’d carefully tucked away into the drawers. He realizes suddenly that Benny’d have no idea how to run credit card scams, had no ID, no way to pass a background check. Benny probably hasn’t spent much time learning how to run a con—he was law-abiding before he’d turned, then lived with a nest that took what they wanted, and Andrea was an heiress. Dean, who grew up learning how to spot a mark, how to bat his eyes or wobble just right, had never considered that it was a skill set not everyone had.

Dean thinks about not having had a home. About how after resurrecting, Benny had returned to the two places he’d lived in life. That there must have been a pull there for him. 

A warm body leans against him. “Turns out I don’t want to be alone right now,” Charlie says. “Turns out I want to be distracted.”

Dean nods. “Okay.”

*

Charlie had grabbed The Fellowship of the Ring from the box of DVDs Dean pulled out from underneath his bed, so they’re sprawled on their stomachs across Dean’s mattress, eating popcorn in the flickering light of the tv.

“I can’t wait to give each other mani-pedis,” Dean says. “Maybe then we can have a pillow fight and practice kissing?”

Charlie snorts. “You do realize that’s not actually how sleepovers work, right?” she asks. “If I’m going to be trusting you about what kind of creatures are real and which are fairy tales, I need to know that you realize that hypothetical situation is about as likely to occur as you and I making out.”

“That’s too bad,” Dean says. “The sleepover thing. Not—"

Charlie wrinkles her nose. “Eww,” she says. Then she sighs. “Yeah, the sleepover thing would have been nice.”

Dean’s hands, almost instinctively, follow the swing of Aragorn’s sword on Weathertop. “I’m not used to having friends,” Dean admits to Charlie.

“No doy,” Charlie replies. “I love you anyway, you giant, closeted nerd.”

Dean snorts and bounces popcorn off her cheek. “Who am I going to come out to, anyway?”

One of Charlie’s eyebrows sneaks up but she bumps her shoulder against his, snags the popcorn off the bedspread, and pops it in her mouth. “I meant that you literally keep your nerd movies where most people keep their porn, but thank you for telling me.”

“Porn’s in the dresser,” Dean says. “I’ve got hunter’s knees. Way easier to get at. There’s a stack of magazines from the Men of Letters’ stash you might want to go through yourself, actually.” They watch the movie for a bit. “I’m just saying,” Dean says. “That there are things I’m good at, and this, having friends, isn’t one of them. If you need something—you gotta tell me, okay?”

“Okay,” Charlie says, and leans her shoulder against his.

A shadow falls across the hallway. It always throws Dean a little how quietly Benny moves.

Charlie holds the popcorn bowl over her and Dean’s heads in Benny’s general direction. “Do vampires eat popcorn?” she asks.

“Not if it has margarine on it,” Benny says.

Dean snorts. “Real butter only, baby.”

Benny hovers at the door until Charlie shakes the bowl of popcorn at him and Dean waves his hand lazily. “Get in here,” Dean says.

Dean’s bed (and that’s never going to get old, is it? _His_ bed.) is big, but it’s definitely not going to fit all three of them easily. Benny takes the bowl of popcorn from Charlie while she and Dean shift around, moving so that Benny can settle with his back against the headboard and feet on the floor. Charlie’s short enough that she’s got room, but Dean’s legs are long enough that Benny rests a light hand on his ankle, indicating Dean can rest his feet against his hip. It should be awkward as fuck, but Charlie’s already settled in, and it’s—kind of nice. 

Dean has always been very, very good at making excuses.

“Funny how everything old is new again,” Benny says. “Reminds me of a book I was reading before I—you know.” He pauses. “Wait, is this—did Tolkien write a sequel to The Hobbit?”

“What,” Charlie says, flat. Flails around for the remote and hits pause. “A SEQUEL. To THE HOBBIT. How do you not know anything about Lord of the Rings? The hat said hipster, but even hipsters can’t pretend to be unaware of the massive influence of the Lord of the Rings trilogy on modern literature and cinema.” Benny is laughing, and that only seems to fuel her rage. “Where were you?” she asks, throwing the pillow she’s been curled up around at Benny and hitting him in the face. 

“Dead, Charlie,” Dean says. “He was dead.” Dean has a moment where he thinks of the flat way in which he said Benny was dead. That he’d told her he’d killed Benny AGAIN the other week. Wonders if he’s rubbing it in.

“Oh,” Charlie says. She doesn’t look at all like she’s going to break. Takes back her pillow as Benny hands it to her. “Well,” she says, with as much dignity as she can muster in fuzzy slippers and a giant lock of hair hanging between her eyes. “Well, good. That’s the only reason I’ll accept.” She smooths her hair back and reaches for the remote. “We’re starting from the beginning, then.” Cate Blanchett's voiceover cuts through the room. “I’ll lend you the books,” she says.

“I take it this movie is a big deal, then,” Benny says, amused.

“Movies,” Charlie corrects, “and books,” and “Shhh, I’ll make you a list of must-watch and must-read pop culture to catch up on later.”

“All right,” Benny says, and Dean nudges him with his foot in thanks.

Charlie falls asleep in the silver-blue light of Lothlórien and Dean not long after. He’s woken hours later by Charlie whimpering in her sleep. They’re still curled together, wrong way around on his bed, but they’re alone and covered with a heavy blanket. “Shhhh,” Dean says, and falls asleep again as Charlie’s forehead smooths out.

*

Sam’s car pulls into the garage as Dean’s unloading the Impala. Or rather, Dean assumes it’s Sam’s car based on the engine growl and location, but the stack of bags he’s carrying obscures his vision somewhat.

“Whoa, hey,” he hears Kevin say, and then the paper towels and toilet paper he’d been balancing atop the other bags disappear.

“They have a warehouse sale, or are you stocking up for the apocalypse?” Sam asks, grabbing the last few bags from the trunk and slamming it closed. He stops. “Please tell me there’s not another apocalypse already.”

“I know I’m new at this,” Kevin says, “but I feel like there’s always an apocalypse.”

Dean shrugs, heads towards the kitchen to start unpacking. “Five mouths,” he says, putting the groceries down. “Five mouths, Sam, which means five butts.”

Sam, stacking cans onto the shelves, pauses briefly with peas above his head before he keeps moving. “Five, huh,” he says with a frown.

“I’m going to assume that this cooler is for Benny,” Kevin says. “I’m going to go and take it to him and it’s just a coincidence that it’s getting me out of this room at this exact moment.”

“Yeah, that’s Benny’s,” Dean says, but Kevin is already out the kitchen door. Dean keeps putting groceries away, letting the silence in the room grow heavier. “You’re the one with a problem,” he eventually tells the crisper. “You’re going to have to be the one to say something.”

Dean hears Sam huff. “Said everything I have to say, and you’re obviously not hearing it.”

“I heard it,” Dean says. “But I’ve decided it’s all stupid as fuck, so I have in turn decided to ignore it.”

“Dean,” Sam says, and he’s obviously working up a head of steam when he looks down and realizes he’s holding a box of tampons. “What,” he says.

Dean blinks at him. “They’re for Charlie,” he says, slowly, “unless you have something to share with the class, Samantha.”

“No, I figured that out,” Sam says. “I’m just surprised you—"

“I lived with Lisa for a year,” Dean says. “You think I was too good to pick shit up for her? You think she wouldn’t have kicked my ass?” Like Dean would ever get involved with anyone who couldn’t kick his ass.

Sam shakes his head. “That’s not what I —” He sighs. “I can’t get anything right with you, can I?” he asks. Sits down heavily at the table.

“I don’t know,” Dean says. They’ve never been GOOD at talking to each, not exactly, and god, there are so many examples of that. They were better before, though, before Purgatory. Dean thinks it’s probably something to do with the fact that in Purgatory, he forgot how to be a person. That when Sam was with Amelia in his soft-focus life, he forgot how to deal with someone who isn’t a person. He reaches back into the fridge and grabs two beers and drops down across from his brother. Pops both tops with his ring and pushes one across the table. He’s always been—Dean thinks he’s always been a little less of a human being than Sam. Daddy’s blunt little instrument, he thinks bitterly.

“I was going to die,” Sam says. “I was ready for that. I was going to die, and the trials were going to kill me, and now—now none of that is happening, and everything is changing so fast.”

“Okay,” Dean says. “You’re benched,” he says, thinking of Benny’s closed eyes as Dean swung his arm, thinking _it was supposed to be me who did the trials_.

“No,” Sam says. “Dean, that’s not how this works. You don’t just get to—"

Dean rolls his beer between his hands. “That’s not what—” he says. “If you’re walking out the door still thinking—still thinking, anywhere in your head, that it’s your time to die.” Dean takes a pull of his beer. He keeps his eyes on the wood grain of the tabletop because he knows that if he closes them he’ll see the moment the blade hit Benny’s neck. “You telling me that you don’t have some boring dusty book you’re dying to translate?”

Sam shrugs. “I mean, I do, but—”

“We’ve got the manpower,” Dean says. Tries to smile. “Charlie is dying to try out her new crossbow.”

“Yeah,” Sam says and drinks. “Okay,” he says finally. “But only—ONLY—if it’s a simple hunt. Anything complicated…”

“Anything complicated and we’ll let you ride to our rescue,” Dean promises. “Or run, anyway. Don’t think they make horses big enough to be ridden by a moose.”

“You’ve seen a real horse,” Sam asks. “Like, in person. I know you have, I was there,” and like that they’re off, the familiar back and forth of banter and barbs that circle deliberately around everything they don’t say.

*

The next hunt that comes up looks like a simple salt and burn in Tulsa. Charlie sulks until Dean finally rolls his eyes and lets her load her crossbow into Baby with the rest of their supplies.

“If you shoot me in the ass with that thing, we are going to have words,” he tells her.

“Yay!” she says and starts looking for the perfect place for it under the Impala’s false trunk bottom.

Sam calls before they even hit Wichita. “Heya, Sammy,” Dean says, chucking his phone on the dashboard on speaker. Charlie has her laptop out in the passenger seat next to him, feet drawn up and legs contorted to support it in a way that makes Dean’s hips ache just to look at.

“I was doing some more reading,” Sam says. “You might want to check out the McDaniel family as well. Some of the older reports in the archives say they have a feud with the Kidds that goes back to the 1850s.”

“The McDaniels also cremate their deceased,” Charlie cuts in. “They’re on the list, but I was thinking we’d check out the Innis family first. Looks like there was some bad blood in the 1940s between them over a piece of land that’s being developed now.”

There’s silence on the other end of the line. Sam coughs. Dean reaches over to offer a hand to Charlie and she high-fives it. 

“Right,” Sam says. “Sounds like you’ve got a handle on it. I just had a bit of free time, and —”

“Uh-huh,” Dean says. “How’s that translation going, by the way?”

Sam coughs. “Just about to get started,” he says.

“Right,” Dean says. “Look, as touching as this concern is, we’ll be fine.”

“I know that,” Sam says. “I just —”

“Yeah, I get it,” Dean says. 

“Okay,” Sam says. “I’ll—”

“Benny speaks decent Latin,” Dean says, casually. “And French.” Like he hasn’t been trying to figure out how to drop it into conversation. “You know. If that dusty old book is part of the international Men of Letter collection—"

“Yeah,” Sam says, abruptly. Then, “Sure. Thanks.” More normally: “Call me if you run into any problems.”

“Will do,” Dean says, and hangs up.

Charlie makes it through two and a half Led Zeppelin tracks before she closes the lid of her laptop and unwinds her legs. “So,” she says, in what she has to know isn’t passing for a casual voice, “Sam and Benny. They seem to not like each other.” 

Dean snorts. “You noticed.”

“I mean, yeah,” Charlie says. “Can we—why is that? Don’t take this the wrong way, but between you and Sam, if one of you was going to befriend a vampire, from the books, I would have thought—”

“Beats the hell out of me,” Dean says. “Sam’s always been the one wanting to let monsters go. Carry on their lives. With far less proof of good intentions than we have from Benny.”

Charlie swings her hands wide. “Wasn’t there even a thing,” she asks, “with another set of vampires?”

“Yeah,” Dean says. “And I’d say it’s the difference between knowing something’s out there and being okay with it sleeping down the hall, but he was like this when Benny was STATES away as well. Got a hunter to follow him around at all times and everything.”

“Yikes,” Charlie says. Barren fields and sparse trees roll by along the highway.

“I don’t get it,” Dean says. “I don’t—Benny was there for me when Sam wasn’t. When Cas wasn’t. He’s the only one who hasn’t let me down and the entire reason I’m alive. He’s the only reason I got out of purgatory. He’s the only reason Sam got out of Purgatory.”

“Ooooh,” Charlie says, like that make everything make more sense instead of less.

“No ‘ooooh,’” Dean says. “That doesn’t—Sam should be—he should be fucking grateful for Benny, to Benny.”

“Yeah,” Charlie says. “Probably.”

Dean leans over and turns off Physical Grafitti. “Talk,” he says.

“Look,” Charlie says. “I don’t know Sam as well as I know you, but. I wonder. Do you think there’s a chance that Benny makes Sam feel guilty?”

Dean snorts. “Doubt it. Whole time I was in Purgatory, dragging Benny up every cliff and through every thicket to find Cas’s ass, Sam wasn’t even looking for me. And Benny—despite everything Sam did, he went back into Purgatory to save his ass.”

“Yeah,” Charlie says, “exactly,” and turns the music back on.

“But,” Dean says, later, as Wichita comes into sight, “what, you think Sam needs to believe that Benny can’t be trusted? That doesn’t—”

“I don’t know,” Charlie says. “But I wouldn’t exactly call any of us ‘emotionally well adjusted.’”

Dean takes the 15 out of Wichita. Kansas Turnpike’s faster but he doesn’t feel like paying the toll and there’s an itch behind his eyes that’s only ever really satisfied when he’s watching blacktop roll out in front of him.

Charlie pulls her laptop back out, twists herself up again, and works quietly for the next couple of hours.

“It’s not just Sam,” Dean says, eventually, watching the yellow lines play out, sweeping the ditches and fields for flashing eyes, playing the accelerator out so that they flow smoothly just above the speed of traffic. “Benny and Cas can’t stand each other either.”

“Benny the one you broke up with?” she asks eventually, not pushing him to make eye contact, just tapping away at her keyboard. Dean can hear her asking the same thing back in that Moondoor tent.

“Yeah,” Dean says this time, and then “but we weren’t—we weren’t actually—"

Charlie’s hand creeps out to near his shoulder, then retreats. “But did you want to?” she asks, and that’s the right question, the question that no one has ever bothered to actually ask him before.

“Maybe,” Dean says, looking at the road, but leaning into her touch, just a little. His voice is low and rough. “It’s complicated.”

“Yeah,” Charlie says. “It usually is.”

*

The salt-and-burn goes about as smoothly as it ever does, which is to say not smoothly at all. They make it out the other side with nothing much more than bumps and bruises and some follicular casualties, which is to say that Charlie gets a bit enthusiastic with the lighter fluid but the ghost goes up in flames.

“Might have been a bit of overkill,” Charlie says when the spirit has stopped screaming and finally dissipated.

“Just the right amount of kill,” Dean says, taking her proffered hand and letting her help pull him upright. “Should have seen Sam and me after our first solo ghost hunt. Any one you walk away from.”

“Yeah,” Charlie says. Walks with him back to the Impala, parked behind some bushes so they can make a getaway before someone calls the cops on account of the fire and screaming. “I’ve kind of been wanting to get a bob, anyway.”

“Sure,” Dean says, starting the car as he hears the first, distant call of sirens. “Maybe look for somewhere in Wichita, though,” he suggests, because she has a list of salons open on her phone. 

“Way ahead of you,” she says, and they spray gravel as they peel out.

*

“Very Marion Davies,” Benny says when he sees them, giving a friendly tug to one of Charlie’s curls. “Picture didn’t do it justice.”

“It’s cute, right?” she asks. “You waited for us to get back to do Return of the King, right?”

Benny raises an eyebrow. “I did promise.”

“Wait, since when do the two of you text each other?” Dean asks.

“Is that a problem?” Charlie asks, and she looks—sharp.

“Nah,” Dean says, placating for some reason he doesn’t understand. “Can’t be playing telephone between the two of you forever.”

Charlie looks satisfied at that. Links one arm with Dean and one with Benny. “For Gondor!” she yells, hauling them behind her.

“Nice hair, Charlie,” Kevin yells from the kitchen as they pass by. 

“Wait,” Sam calls into the hallway behind him. “Dean, are you missing an eyebrow?”

*

Dean thinks about the sharpness with which Charlie had asked him if it was okay if she texted Benny. He thinks about it a lot, over the next couple of days. Thinks about how Benny’s barely left the bunker, other than long, aimless walks at night from which he returns smelling of night air and dry grass.

He walks up to Benny’s door two times, three times, before he steels himself and knocks.

“Come on in,” Benny says. He’s sitting at his desk, reading. Looks up from his book and is good enough to pretend like he couldn’t hear the doppler of Dean’s heartbeat approach and fall away from his door.

“Hey,” Dean says. Sits down at the foot of Benny’s bed, awkwardly. “Look,” he says. Pauses. “I was thinking.” Tries to figure out what to say. “If you ever want to leave—"

“I understand if you want me gone,” Benny says. His face is—he looks unsurprised, like he’s been waiting for—

“No,” Dean says. “That’s not what I—” He takes a deep breath. “Look, give me a minute.”

“All right,” Benny says. Carefully closes his book and stacks it with the others on his desk.

Dean untwists his hands. Runs his fingertips across the soft afghan folded at the foot of Benny’s bed. “You’re allowed to leave if you want,” Dean says. “I want you here. You’re welcome for as long as you want. But you’re not a prisoner. You don’t need a day pass for good behavior or anything. If you want—if you want to go to the mall, or you want to go get books that Charlie or I didn’t pick out for you, or you want—I don’t know, sushi or new suspenders or some shit, you’re free to leave, for as long as you want. Get a job, or—Or if you want to take off for good—"

Benny nods. “Okay,” he says.

Dean feels the bottom drop out of his stomach. “Right,” he says.

Benny laughs, gentle. “Not that last one, Chief,” he says. He gets up and settles next to Dean on the bed, and Dean’s throat goes a little dry as Benny’s firm thigh presses against his. “Believe me, if I was going to take off for good, I’d let you know.”

 _Would you_ , Dean thinks, thinking about how Sam’d told him Benny was going to stay behind in Purgatory. 

Benny must sense the change in Dean’s heart rate or something because he leans his shoulder against Dean’s for a long, comforting moment. “Promise,” Benny says.

“Okay,” Dean says, and sits there, thigh to thigh, shoulder to shoulder, and tries to take him at his word.

*

Sam and Benny appear to have worked out some kind of uneasy truce while Dean and Charlie were gone.

Dean still bristles if they stand too close together or if Sam’s voice rises a little too sharply when he’s talking to Benny, but he feels less like he’s riding a constant knife’s edge. He wants to know what the terms they’ve come to are, if Benny bared his neck, if Sam opened his hand or his arm because he couldn’t make himself take Dean’s word on Benny’s self-control. 

He wants to know, because he closes his eyes and sees Sam, bleeding and hand ready on a machete, sees Benny with his eyes and jaw tight and chin tilted back. 

He wants to know, but everyone’s heads are still attached and he doesn’t want to throw off whatever delicate balance has been struck.

*

“What if I was thinking I’d like to try hunting some time,” Benny says. He’s gamely cutting a piece off of his pancake.

“Don’t eat that,” Dean says, chewing mechanically. “These taste terrible. I can’t imagine how much worse they’d be for you.”

“They’re not that bad,” Sam sulks, cutting into his own pancake. “Mmmm,” he says around a mouthful.

“I’m sorry, Sam,” Kevin says. “But these really are that bad.”

“You tried,” Charlie says, patting Sam on the shoulder as he tries to subtly spit his pancake back into his napkin.

“Yeah,” Sam says, finally. “They are that bad. No one eat them.”

“Thank the lord,” Benny says, putting his fork down heavily.

“Hunting?” Sam asks.

“Yeah,” Benny says. “I’m not bad with a blade.”

Kevin snorts. “I bet being able to rip people apart with your bare hands doesn’t hurt, either.”

Benny inclines his head in acknowledgment and deliberately lets his fangs drop. 

“Oh my god, stop eating those,” Sam tells Dean, and pulls his plate away from him.

“Isss fine,” Dean says around a mouth full of awful, vaguely pancake-shaped food. Sam’s trying, he really is. And Dean - well, Dean’s eaten worse.

“No,” Sam says, batting at Dean’s hand as Dean covers his plate.

“I’ll never get over how cool that is,” Kevin says, looking at Benny’s teeth. 

“You sure?” Dean asks Benny as he puts his teeth away. 

“Might as well start pulling my weight around here,” Benny says.

Dean stiffens a little at that, because it’s one thing if Benny’s looking for something to do, but - “Hey!” Dean says as Sam uses his distraction to get the plate of terrible, terrible pancakes away from him.

“Oooh,” Charlie says. “That means you’re going to need a Fed suit.”

“I’m heading into Manhattan next week to pick up some herbs and metals we can’t get here,” Sam says. “I could take you.”

Charlie waves her hand. “Don’t worry about it,” she says. She winds an arm through Dean’s, and pokes him none-too-subtly with her elbow. “Dean and I will take you,” she tells Benny. “I need to pick up _Riders of Rohan_ and a glave anyway.”

*

There’s a soft knock at Dean’s door, barely a ghost of a noise, not nearly enough to wake him if the light spilling out from around the doorframe was a lie and he was actually asleep. When he opens it, Charlie’s standing there, half turned away.

“You’re up,” she says, then, “of course you are, this would be a weird thing for me to be hallucinating about.”

“Yeah,” he says, taking in the dark smudges beneath her eyes and the way she seems to be vibrating a little. “Monster movies or terrible romcoms?” he asks, stepping aside to let her into his room, letting his face perform a complicated and exaggerated dance of disgust at the last option.

She snorts. “Spare me the pantomime of heteronormative pretense.”

Dean shrugs. “You want me to —” he trails off, gesturing down the hall.

“Yeah,” she says, pulling out the box of movies from beneath his bed. “Duh.”

Dean waits outside Benny’s room for a heartbeat or two before the other man opens it. Dean tilts his head across the hall, to where Charlie is visible through the open door, pushing the box back under Dean’s bed. Benny nods wordlessly and they crowd back into Dean’s room. Charlie has pulled a copy of The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms from the Harryhausen box set Dean picked up at some point after this became a thing. Kind of a thing. When it moved from ‘educating Benny on some of the pop culture he’d missed out on,’ Benny talking about a string of favorite b-movies he saw in first-run theatres in the 1950s, Charlie yelling about Game of Thrones, and neither Benny or Charlie having seen a single All Saints’ Day movie or even having heard of Hatchet Man.

Neither Charlie nor Dean sleeps too well, sometimes. Benny doesn’t need much. Dean thinks, sometimes, that maybe he should go out and get a big TV and a couch and set up a recreation room, or something. That would make sense. But he worries, a little, that if he points out how often they do it, that Charlie and Benny will decide they have better things to do. And even if not—yeah, they haul an extra chair or two around sometimes, depending, but there’s this delicate balance they’ve found of how close they can sit and how many people fit on a bed, depending on injuries, and Dean—honestly, Dean finds he kind of likes it, the casual touch. And if he’s had one of those days where he can feel the nightmares nipping at his heels, he can just—if he grumbles and throws on a movie and one or the other joins him, sometimes he can fall asleep before the bad dreams catch him.

*

“You decent?” Dean asks, rapping at the change room door with one knuckle. The big band music cuts out and Dean can see that Charlie has abandoned her post in the waiting area to flirt with a woman who has been trying on slim-cut men’s blazers deliberately in her line of sight.

“Never,” Benny drawls from the other side of the door. The air is filled with the standard off-brand classical music now that Charlie’s been distracted from her shopping montage. “But I’m dressed enough for your delicate sensibilities.”

Dean snorts and pushes his way into the change room when he hears the flimsy lock open. “Look, man, I’m just saying pants are common courtesy,” like they didn’t spend a year together in Purgatory with one set of clothes each. 

The door closes behind him, and it’s not exactly a small change room, but it leaves them close enough that limbs brush. Close enough that Dean can smell the soft sandalwood of Benny’s soap over the almost-sharp scent of him.

“Uh-huh,” Benny says, examining himself critically in the mirror.

“Common courtesy,” Dean says, eyes stuck on Benny’s broad hands, Benny’s fingers, as he carefully, practicedly, does up the buttons on the crisp dress shirt. Benny’s wearing dark gray slacks and there’s a thread of blue through the white of the dress shirt, the shirt finally one broad enough for his chest without drooping elsewhere, and Dean’s mouth is dry as the hollow of Benny’s throat disappears beneath the buttons. He wonders if Benny can smell it, the sharp punch of desire that cuts from the back of Dean’s throat down his spine, pools low in his torso and the soles of his feet, the curl of his toes.

“Charlie work up the nerve to talk to that girl out there?” Benny asks, draping a tie loose around his neck. His nostrils don’t flare out at Dean or anything, so Dean thinks he’s probably safe.

“Oh, yeah,” Dean says, words coming out surprisingly normal. He saw far more of Benny’s body when they were in Purgatory, but the same gray flatness that wiped away so many needs—food, sleep, water, blood—compressed desire in the same way. “Figured we should give her a couple minutes,” he says, like what he actually came in here to say wasn’t what he says next, which is, “Look, I just—I wanted to make sure that you want to do this.”

Benny’s hands still on his tie and Dean automatically reaches out to take the ends.

“I was enjoying the musical montage, actually,” Benny says. Tilts his head up towards Dean as Dean crosses one end of the tie over the other. The fabric catches slightly where Dean’s hands are rough. 

“The hunting,” Dean says, hands working. “I know you took out your nest, and that punk back in Carencro,” he says, setting the knot. “But you had your reasons then,” he says, looping the wide end of the tie through the knot. “You don’t actually have to earn your keep or anything. You don’t—you don’t owe me anything, okay.”

“Hey,” Benny says. His hands come up to rest on Dean’s as Dean carefully tightens the knot to the hollow of Benny’s throat. “I’m sure,” Benny says. Dean’s knuckles rest against the solid sweep of his collarbone. Beny’s skin is enough above room temperature that it wouldn’t completely freak out a civilian, but low enough that someone like Sam or Dean who accepts the existence of vampires will know.

“Okay,” Dean says, and uncurls his hand against Benny’s collarbone, fingers flat on the trapezius muscles sweeping up his neck, heel of his palm nestled into the shadow of intercostal space. A short, high laugh cuts through the tinkly cocoon of classical music, and Dean’s lungs expand wide as the world comes crashing back in.

“Okay,” Benny repeats, and his hands tighten once around Dean’s before releasing.

“Okay,” Dean says again. “This is the one, by the way.” 

Benny tilts his head and cocks an eyebrow.

“The suit,” Dean says, heat in his face. “I’ll see if they can find you a matching jacket.”

The salesman raises a half-knowing, half-judgmental eyebrow at Dean when Dean makes his way back out, but Dean’s still put together everywhere but for the color in his cheeks.

“I’ll see if they can find you a matching jacket,” Dean parrots back to himself under his breath and he drops back into the chair outside the changing room and stares blankly at the ceiling.

Shit.

*

Later, Dean looks over to see Charlie gesturing at him significantly. The woman who was flirting with her is ringing something up at the till, and Charlie is shooting Dean a complicated and exaggerated set of pantomimes. Dean fights to keep the corner of his mouth from twisting in amusement, loses the battle when she pulls out her phone and starts texting him. His phone buzzes in his pocket, and Charlie looks up from her phone to find him flashing her an exaggerated wink and a thumbs-up. She flips him off as she follows the woman out of the store.

Good for her, Dean thinks, standing to wave out the store window at her. One of them should be getting somewhere with someone.

“We lose Charlie?” Benny’s voice comes, a low rumble close enough to Dean’s shoulder that he should probably worry about the fact he didn’t notice Benny appear.

Dean watches as the other woman hands Charlie a helmet for a motorcycle. “Just for a bit,” Dean says. “She’s just going to-” He pulls out his phone to text her _nice_ , sees the message she sent. “She’s going to a ‘butterfly garden,’” Dean says.

“That newfangled slang or something?” Benny asks. 

Dean snorts. “Honestly, I’d give it even odds.”

They stand there silently. Benny has the new suit slung over one arm. He’s back in his dark coat and white shirt, top button undone, and Dean’s fingers twitch a little at the memory of the tie sliding through his fingers, the wing of Benny’s collarbone against his palm.

“You hungry?” Benny asks.

Dean’s stomach growls, saving him from having to try to figure out what way to answer the question.

*

“You want us to steal you a car while we’re in town?” Dean asks, absently licking a rivulet of vanilla ice cream where it’s making its way down the back of his hand. It’s a hot day out, and they’re sitting deep enough under some trees that the shade brings some temperature relief to Dean, and light relief to Benny. Dean’s down to his t-shirt, sitting in the grass and leaning back against the trunk of a tree with an ice cream cone in hand. He hadn’t even realized he was hungry until Benny suggested it.

“Sorry?” Benny asks, and he’s barely touched his milkshake, which is funny because he’s the one who wanted ice cream in the first place. There’s this look on his face like he’s half somewhere else, and Dean wonders if they’re far enough out of the sun for him. 

“Car,” Dean repeats. “You want us to steal you one of your own while we’re in town?”

Benny shakes his head. “Nah, brother,” he says, and takes a long drink from his straw.

“You sure?” Dean asks. “No way we’re going to be able to get that piece of shit camper of yours back at this point.” _You should have a way to leave, when you want to_ , Dean doesn’t know how to say.

“Don’t want to leave some poor family out their vehicle, not unless I have to,” Benny says.

A terrible thought occurs to Dean. “You didn’t pay money for that piece of junk you were driving, did you?” he asks.

“I strike you as someone who knows how to reprogram one of these fancified computer cars?” Benny asks, which is exactly the same as admitting that yes, he did pay money for it and shouldn’t be left unsupervised. “It was a hayburner, but it was good to have someplace to call my own.”

Dean, who learned to drive as soon as his feet could reach the pedals, who learned to hotwire a car not a month after that, blinks. “Huh,” he says, and “we’ll have to work on that.” There are some cars in the garage he’s been meaning to get up and running anyway. Or, he could always steal a car and pretend he hustled the money to get it on the cheap and sketchy, but he’s not sure if Benny’d be able to smell how recently someone else had owned it. The piece-of-shit truck Benny’d been driving was more than old enough that computers wouldn’t have been any kind of issue, which means paying actual money for it was either lack of know-how or some kind of personal code. “We’ll figure something out,” Dean says, leaning in to lick up a rivulet of ice cream that’s made its way across the back of his hand and to the turn of his wrist. 

Benny chokes on his milkshake.

“You okay?” Dean asks. “They didn’t bless that milkshake or anything?”

Benny’s cough turns into a laugh in a way it couldn’t if breathing weren’t more a camouflage than a necessity for him. 

Dean’s phone vibrates with a text from Charlie. It’s a pickup location and a close-up photo of a butterfly on some kind of yellow flower, because apparently “butterfly garden” wasn’t actually code for anything more fun. 

These are the people Dean’s chosen to hang out with. Whom he’s chosen for friends. Who pay money for shitty, falling-apart trucks and take off with strangers to look at bugs. 

Charlie spends most of the trip back to the Bunker texting and smiling out the window, eyes bright and crinkled, and Benny shares his milkshake as Dean drives.

*

“Hello, Dean,” Cas says, and Dean just about jumps out of his skin.

“We’ve talked about this,” Dean snarls, and his body pulls Cas into a hug even as it remembers the last time he saw Cas, the broken bones in Dean’s face and arm knitting back together, the taste of his own blood in his mouth.

Dean’s not sure what his heart is doing but it must be all over the place, because when he lets go of Cas, Benny is looking at him in concern. Concern shifts to suspicion as Benny and Cas regard each other carefully. Benny’s jaw clenches like he’s trying to keep his teeth back.

“Cas,” Sam says and pushes forward to try to hug Cas.

“So you’re an angel?” Charlie asks, “I have a literal list of questions for you,” she says, as Cas keeps staring impassively at Benny over Sam’s shoulder.

“Oh my god, not this again,” Dean whispers as Kevin says “What happened? Where’s the tablet?” because Kevin is apparently the only fucking adult they know.

“The tablet is—the tablets are out of play,” Cas says. “A deal has been struck.”

Sam makes a face. “No offense, Cas, but we’re going to need more details than that.”

“I’m sorry I haven’t responded to any of your prayers,” Cas tells Dean, like Dean is totally cool with everyone knowing he’s been praying to Cas. “The situation has become even more complicated. There is a being called Metatron, and he—”

“Wait, Metatron is real?” Sam asks. Pauses. “I’m not sure why I keep being surprised by these things.”

“Nor am I,” Cas says. “The arbitrary boundaries of your skepticism are a constant point of confusion to me.”

“Tablets,” Kevin says.

“Yes,” Cas says. “Being that you have decided against using them, and that Heaven and Hell are currently embroiled in a multifaceted civil war that includes a battalion of prisoners that Metatron has released from the prisons of both Heaven and Hell, the decision was made to throw the tablets that we were in possession of into several suns.”

“Bullshit,” Dean says.

“You really think we’re going to take your word on that?” Sam says. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I still don’t know what went down in that crypt, but Dean was —”

“Dean was fine,” Dean says. Cas looks stricken. Benny shifts. “Dean is always fine,” Dean says. “Christ.”

“I—” Cas says. “I know that currently, I have not done much to regain your trust, but—”

“Was it last week?” Kevin breaks in.

“Yes,” Cas says, warily.

“Okay,” Kevin says. “Okay, I believe him.”

Dean blinks. Cas looks more surprised than any of them.

“I have questions,” Sam says.

“I felt something,” Kevin says. “Last week.”

Cas nods. “As a prophet, you are linked to the tablets. It makes sense that you might have registered it somehow.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?” Sam asks.

Kevin winces. “Honestly, at the time I thought it was from the pancakes.”

“They weren’t that—" Sam takes a deep breath. “Okay. Maybe they were that bad. But I still don’t—”

“I’m with Sam,” Dean says, crossing his arms. “I don’t—Cas, how do we know you’re not still mind-whammied? That makes more sense than Crowley and Naomi deciding to destroy the most powerful weapon they could get their hands on.”

“I don’t know what else to tell you,” Castiel says. “There was a weapon of mass destruction—one that had the potential to destroy the entire universe in our struggle for it. I’m not saying that the choice was without its detractors, but ultimately an executive decision was made to remove it from play before it destroyed the entirety of creation. It was logical. I don’t understand why that decision is so hard to comprehend.”

“Because we’re human,” Benny says. At some point, he’d put himself right in Dean’s space, and Dean didn’t consciously notice. Benny clears his throat. “Or, we were born that way, anyway. I remember when they dropped the bombs on Hiroshima. I remember the first pictures that came out, the inverse shadows on the walls. You know what it was like to come back to a world with this many nuclear weapons?” 

“Ah,” Cas says, “yes.”

Kevin and Charlie—who are too young to remember the Cold War—and Sam and Dean—who had a childhood in which John Winchester and monsters and a yellow-eyed demon loomed much closer than the threat of nuclear war—shrug.

“Believe me, or don’t,” Cas says. “But if you lock the portion of the tablet you hold away, if you ward it and bury it in stone and keep it somewhere only you know, no one will be able to find it, and you will have it in case of future need.”

“So we’re holding onto the last atom bomb, just in case?” Charlie clarifies. “Yeah, that sounds about right.”

Later, when Kevin has pored over the Enochian notes Cas provided to check their providence, when they’ve found the last of the ingredients in the farthest of the Men of Letters storerooms, Dean finds Cas standing in the hallway outside his room, looking at the closed door.

“It’s all still there,” Dean says. “Your stuff. You didn’t have much shit, but it’s all still there. It’s still your room.”

“Yes,” Cas says, looking at the closed door. “Dean,” he says. “I—”

“You’re not staying,” Dean says. He can taste the dust-dank-still air of the crypt on his tongue. Can taste his own blood in his mouth.

“No,” Cas says. He takes a step towards Dean. Reaches—starts to reach for Dean’s arm, and Dean’s heart goes a little wild and Cas falls back. “Dean, I’m —”

“We’re not talking about that,” Dean says. Tries not to hear the snap of his radius and ulna. He closes his eyes for a second, can see Cas standing over him, Dean’s blood glittering on Cas’s fist as it arcs back toward him. Feel his zygomatic cave. “Wasn’t you.”

“It was,” Cas says.

“That why’re you leaving?” Dean asks. “Because if so, you’re also the one who stopped. Who healed me up.”

Cas closes his eyes. Dean wonders what he’s seeing, in the long moment before they open again. “It’s not that simple,” he says.

Leaving is what you’re good at, Dean wants to say. Wants to know if that would hurt. Thinks about landing in Purgatory and turning around to find Cas gone. Thinks of Cas disappearing wordlessly, leaving Dean alone in the dust-mildew-blood scent of the crypt. Of the water closing around Cas as he walked into that lake to explode. 

Dean—Dean knows that he’s being shitty. That every situation was complicated and he’s done his fair share of shit. That by the sounds of it, they’re this close to a battle between Heaven, Hell, and freaking Metatron spilling over onto Earth and becoming something else he and Sam are going to have to clean up after, like they always do. That it’s not about him. “Yeah,” he says. “Okay. It never is, is it?” he asks, deliberately reaching out to clasp Cas’s shoulder.

“It’s not—I’m not saying I’ll never be back,” Cas says. “I wish—” He Inhales. Dean can feel the movement of his shoulder as his lungs expand.

“Yeah,” Dean says. “Yeah, buddy, I know.”

*

Dean lies awake when Cas is gone. _Leave your shit_ , he’d told Cas. _It’ll always be your room. You can always_ — he’d said, trailing off, because Cas was looking at him in that way that Dean figured out years ago meant that Cas was looking right past him and into his soul. Dean’s been lying in the dark for what feels like—and what the red glowing numbers beside his bed confirm to be—hours.

Dean stares up at the ceiling and rubs at a phantom ache in his arm, and he’s not sure what he’s feeling. If it’s the memory of Benny’s soul curled under his skin, Cas knitting his bones back together, or the strain in his muscles from taking Benny’s head off.

*

“There’s never a case around when you want one,” Dean bitches. Drops his head face-first into the book he’s reading. Trying to read. He lets his eyes drift closed. He’s been on the same paragraph for the last half bag of chips. It’s been weeks since something cropped up. They’re all gathered in the library because Kevin wanted to use the downtime to do a research binge on vrykolakas.

Sam, pacing back and forth with a book, muttering in Latin under his breath, stops. “Are you seriously complaining about a lack of suspicious murders?” 

“Course he is,” Benny says, turning a page without looking up.

“Yes,” Dean says. Expends far too much effort to wedge his eyes back open. “Because there is going to BE a murder if I have to keep reading about the —” he double-checks “ _medicinal and mystical properties of human urine_.”

Kevin looks up. “What? Why are you reading that?”

Dean waves his hand. “It was in the pile of books you shoved at me.”

Sam frowns. “Are you eating chips while handling ancient books? Ancient books on urine?”

“No,” Dean says around a mouth full of barbeque. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Charlie tilt the bag away from him and surreptitiously dust crumbs off on her pants. Benny doesn’t bother to cover his laugh.

“You shouldn’t be reading that,” Kevin says. “It doesn’t—didn’t it seem weird that it didn’t have anything to do with vrykolakas?”

“It’s an undead vampire werewolf,” Dean says. “How am I supposed to know what kind of lore surrounds an undead vampire werewolf? I figured you eggheads had a reason,” Dean says. Kicks his feet up on the table and grins pretty. Posing just a bit. “That’s how this usually works. You smart people find something, point me at it, and I kill it.” Then—“Hey, OW,” as Charlie starts hitting him over the head with her bag of chips.

“Stop it,” she says and smacks him with the chips again. Unfortunately, Dean had thrown himself into a precariously balanced position in order to flex his thighs while he mugged with his feet on the table, and when he goes to block her next swing he over-balances in the chair and crashes down on his back.

“Huh,” Dean says into the silence that follows. “Did you know there’s a rune up there that looks like the Dead Kennedys logo?”

Charlie drops down on her back beside him. “Huh,” she says, looking at the glyphs carved into the roofs and beams. “You know, I’ve never thought about how many mystical symbols look like the logos from anarcho-punk bands, but the one next to it is one swirly thing past Husker Du’s.”

“Is Husker Du really anarchist, though?” Dean asks. 

“Husker who?” Sam asks. 

“Awww, did the college radio station only play music from screaming girl groups and soft, plaintive guitar from misunderstood boys?” Dean asks.

Sam coughs. “There was also a lot of dead air and slam poetry,” he says.

“You’re all so old,” Kevin says.

Benny looms into Dean’s field of view, offering a hand to both him and Charlie, pulling them effortlessly to their feet. Dean’s heart definitely doesn’t thump a little at the casual show of strength, or the way Benny’s hand seems to linger on his for a moment or two longer than necessary.

“It’s called an iPod,” Charlie tells Kevin. “Please tell me you’ve at least heard of The Pixies.”

“Who even has an iPod anymore?” Kevin asks.

“It’s called vinyl,” Dean insists. “Sound quality is heads and tails above—”

Charlie crosses her arms. “Tell me,” she says. “Do you, personally, own any vinyl?”

“Yes,” Dean says confidently, hoping it’ll carry him through.

“Really?” Charlie asks. “And where do you store it? Because I have seen the contents of both your nerd box and porn drawer—"

Kevin starts laughing. 

Sam closes his book and drops down in a chair at the table. “I WISH I still didn’t understand this conversation.”

“—and you have no vinyl of any kind anywhere,” Charlie says, “But if you want to talk sexto—" and falls silent as Dean throws a hand over her mouth. He scowls as threateningly as possible at her, and she raises an entirely unimpressed eyebrow in response. “Sixteen different John Wayne movies,” Charlie finishes when Dean removes his hand.

Kevin is still laughing. Sam is thunking his head on the table. Benny looks a little disgruntled, a little constipated, or something. “What’s the matter?” Dean asks. “You offended by my stash of… westerns?”

“Nah,” Benny says. “Only by your taste in cowboys.”

“I think them are fighting words,” Charlie mock whispers.

Dean crosses his arms. “You got a problem with the Duke?”

“Man knew how to ride, but he clearly hated horses,” Benny says.

“Lies!” Dean says. “Damn, dirty lies.”

Benny shakes his head. “I pre-date cars. I’ve spent enough time on horseback to know when someone’s only riding because he has to.”

“Huh,” Dean says, and does his best impression of someone whose brain hasn’t just imploded.

“Right,” Sam says. “Can we please go back to talking about medicinal uses for human urine?”

*

“Feel like a road trip?” Dean asks, throwing himself down on Charlie’s half-made bed. “Uggh,” he says. “Your mattress is terrible.”

“Yeah,” Charlie says, twisting at her desk to look at him. “I’ve been meaning to complain to the management that the quality of this establishment is really not up to the level I expect for the high, high price I’m paying.”

“Drop the complaint in the suggestion box and we’ll see what we can do.” Dean waves his hand lazily. “Road trip?”

Charlie crosses her arms across the back of her chair. “When?” she asks. “Also, why? Also, where?”

“Why, because I’m going stir-crazy,” Dean says. “Might have a case in Provo, but I’ll be honest, it’s weak. I want action, I want adventure, I want to stare at a different ceiling while I pretend to sleep.”

Charlie wrinkles her nose. “Ugh,” she says. “Utah? No thanks.”

“You’ve got a date with butterfly girl this weekend, huh?” Dean says. Grabs the Rubik’s Cube from her bedside table and starts fiddling with it.

“Yes,” Charlie says. “Yes, I do, and her name is Parisa, but I stand by my ‘ugggh, Utah’ statement. Especially in July. Sam already turned you down?”

“Yeah,” Dean says. Swears when he loses a white row and can’t get it back. “He’s pretty sure it’s just college kids dicking around over the summer, not a wraith.”

“Utah in July, and potential frat bros? Double pass.”

Dean grimaces. “Figured as much,” he says. “Sam’s probably right. Provo, man.” He remembers Bobby once laughing and dismissing a case just because it was in Provo. _You live long enough and you learn a few things, boy_ Bobby’d said. _Like that nothing interesting ever happens in Provo._

“Take Benny,” she says, waggling her eyebrows. “Gives you an excuse to put him in the suit.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Dean says, with as much conviction and dignity as he can muster, which is even less than normal while playing with a rainbow twisty cube.

“Uh-huh,” Charlie says, holding out her hands for the Rubik’s cube and catching it when Dean tosses it to her. “Sure,” she says, and, “What the hell did you do to this?” as Dean flushes and darts for the door.

*

Benny’s in his room, opens the door as Dean’s knuckles hit it. “Come on in, brother,” he says.

Dean drops down on Benny’s bed, much like he did with Charlie’s. Because he threw himself on Charlie’s, and his brain is insisting that it’ll be suspicious if he doesn’t do the same here. Benny’s bed is neatly made, sharp corners and well-fluffed pillows, extra blankets folded at the foot. Dean makes a face. “Your mattress is just as bad as Charlie’s,” he says. “Seriously. Does no one else in this bunker care about their spines?”

Benny laughs a little. His eyes on Dean are—not sharp, but intent. “Feels mighty fine to me. ‘Course, I haven’t had a real bed since the 1960s.”

“Right,” Dean says. The blankets smell a little like the laundry detergent they use and a little like Benny. “You might welcome a motel room bed, if this is what you’ve been sleeping on,” Dean offers.

Benny’s face goes a bit distant, and Dean swings himself upright, rests his elbows on his knees. Dean kicks himself, just a bit. “How’d you feel about a bit of a road trip?” he asks. “Stretch your legs, save a life, maybe get to kill something.”

Benny grins, teeth sharp. “Sounds like my kind of a time.”

*

“You care if we take the I-70?” Dean asks, when they’re loading the car. It’s dark out, sun starting to paint the faintest of lights along the horizon. He’d gotten up when he was tired of staring at the ceiling, found Benny making breakfast sandwiches in the kitchen. Dean’s dressed down in plaid and a henley and soft-worn jeans, has his suit lying in the back seat because it’s an all-day drive.

“Driver’s choice,” Benny says, inclining his head.

“Cool,” Dean says.

“80’s faster,” Dean says later, after Denver, after they’ve broken for lunch in the brightest part of the day. “I-80’s faster, but Nebraska is as open a pile of nothing as Kansas,” he says as the Rockies unspool around them. It’s a clear, bright day but it doesn’t seem to bother Benny much between his hat and sunglasses and the Impala’s visor pulled down.

“This is something else,” Benny says, voice soft. He’s staring out the window with almost rapt attention, watching the mountains surge above them as they travel deeper, the clear delineation of cloud shadows as they sweep across the geometric rock faces and proud, straight evergreens and blue-green lakes. “Spent most of my life in the coastal plains and the bayous and at sea.”

“Don’t get to come through here much myself,” Dean says. Tries to play it off like he doesn’t have favorite stretches of highway, because he knows that’s weird. Tries to play it off like it doesn’t mean something to him, that Benny gets the way this stretch of road twists something in Dean’s soul. Dean—Dean hasn’t been through here since Hell, and he’s weirdly glad to find that it means the same thing to him now.

“Do you ever just—stop and enjoy where you’re at?” Benny asks.

Dean shrugs. “Lives at stake,” he says, and “you spend enough time on the road and you just want to be the place you’re going,” he says. Knows that was true for Dad, for Sam. Sometimes Dean thinks he’s spent most of his life in the front seat of this car. When he was little he would sit up here beside his father, Sam in the back reading or doing homework while Dean juggled the sprawl of paper maps, keeping track of exits and interchanges. He got good, young, quickly, at finding the fastest route between two points. Pretty much as soon as Dean looked old enough to legally drive they got another car, because Dad and Sam got along best when they spent as little time together as possible. It was pretty much the same then, Dean up front with the window down, Sammy in the back seat reading or doing homework because Dean was damned if his little brother wasn’t going to get the chance to finish high school. It was easier then, sometimes, to just follow the straight line Dad cut across the country, rather than rifle through the mix of maps on the front passenger seat, risk getting wherever they were going late and finding Dad waiting and angry.

“Seems a shame to go so many places without really seeing them,” Benny says. Rests his elbow on the window and stares, captivated, through the glass. He relaxes a bit when they hit the Eisenhower Tunnel. It’s more than a mile through the mountain in gray concrete and solid fluorescents, and Dean holds his breath a little when they start to see the light at the end of the tunnel. It always creeps up on him quicker than he thinks, a sudden burst of sunlight his eyes take a blink to adjust to. It always catches him by surprise, how exiting the tunnel into the thin mountain air feels like you’re flying out the top of the world.

Dean hears Benny’s breath catch, an honest physiological response rooted so deep in human psychology it cuts through things like ‘not actually needing to breathe.’ Dean grins. “Right?” he asks, watching the sky and the road and the way Benny’s hand presses reflexively against the glass at the mountains unwinding before them.

*

The coroner is short and harried, scraped-back hair and no-nonsense eyebrows. “No idea why the Feds are interested in this, but you’re not going to like it,” she says, rapid strides carrying her through the morgue to her desk. It’s pretty standard as far as these things go—piles of papers and a sloping, uneven stack of folders, small tumbles of microtapes from recorders, fifteen-year service plaque. Empty coffee cup and a bottle of hot sauce because, like hunting, it’s a job that makes you so inured to death you can eat anywhere. “Never seen anything like it,” she says as she locates the correct folder, as she flips through the case file.

“Wish I had a nickel for every time I’d heard that,” Dean whispers under his breath. Benny laughs, short and bright, and turns it into a cough as she looks up at them sharply.

“Doctor Isip,” Dean says. “I guarantee you we’ve seen weirder.”

“Perfectly healthy young man,” she says. “Except for the fact that his brain was a dried-out husk.”

“Strange indeed,” Benny says, doing a very poor impression of someone who wasn’t expecting to hear that.

“Uh-huh,” the corner says, narrowing her eyes at them beneath her heavy glasses as she hands over her notes.

*

“Have to say, I was kinda hoping it’d turn out to be a bunch of kids who’d gotten the wrong end of a psychedelic trip,” Benny says.

“Yeah,” Dean says, loosening his tie, flipping through files from the police report spread out on the table. “That’s the dream,” he says, waving the witness statements above his head until Benny takes them. Benny drops down at the table across from him. He’s stripped off the coat and has the sleeves of his dress shirt rolled up his forearms. The table’s small, and their knees are close enough together that they bump occasionally. “Does wraith venom work on vampires?” Dean asks after a while.

“Didn’t in Purgatory,” Benny says. “No idea if it works topside.”

“Better hope it doesn’t,” Dean says. “Worst trip I’ve ever had.” He winces a little at the thought of it, the soul-bruised, beaten down feeling he’d rolled out of that asylum with, every fuck-up he’d ever made roiling through his head. “Last one we fought we had to get ourselves thrown in an asylum with Martin. Almost did not end well, thank you very much.” He snorts. “She even had the audacity to criticize my sleep patterns.” It was the hallucination she caused that criticized his sleep patterns, but it’s easier for Dean to chalk all its vicious words up to someone else rather than the monsters living in his own head.

“You don’t sleep enough, brother,” Benny says. His voice is easy but his eyes are tight.

“You know I don’t blame you for that, right?” Dean asks. “Martin. You know that I don’t expect you to just—lay down and die,” he says, hand and forearm tightening automatically.

Benny shrugs. “Course.”

“Do you?” Dean asks. “He was going to kill you. He threatened Elizabeth. She’s your blood, and he put a knife to her throat.”

“I was there for that bit, actually,” Benny observes. He’s trying for mild. “Can’t help but think that it could have ended a different way, if I’d kept my head.”

“You did keep your head,” Dean says. “That was pretty much the only way you were going to stay attached to it. You’d already left once, and he called you back. Forced you back. Anything less, and he was going to follow you to the ends of the earth. Once Martin got it in his head to end you, it was always going to end bloody.” Dean’s hand curls. Tightens. Martin had taken himself out of the game years ago for a reason. Martin had taken Dean down as soon as it became clear Dean wasn’t going to let him play out his little savior fantasy.

“Someone tries to take your head off, you fight back,” Dean says. “Doesn’t matter who it is.” He feels strain in his knuckles. “If it’s some random hunter. If it’s another vamp. If it’s me.” 

Benny reaches out and puts his hand on Dean’s, and Dean doesn’t realize until that moment that his fist is clenched so tight it’s white through, that the tension is vibrating up his arm. “Okay,” Benny says, turning Dean’s hand over and encouraging him to relax it. His voice is soft but steady. He sounds tired, watching carefully as Dean unclenches his fist. There are crescent marks scored deep into his palm. Benny rubs his thumbs across Dean’s palm firmly, helping the blood flow back in. “Okay,” Benny says, meeting Dean’s eyes solidly and squeezing Dean’s hand. 

“Okay,” Dean says, and “yeah,” and “good,” untangling a moment too late and sitting back in his chair and pretending he can’t still feel Benny’s hand on his.

 _Ur right_ , he texts Sam. _Frat guys totally dehydrate their entire brains all the time._

*

Another body turns up drained in a wildlife reserve outside the city, staring blind-eyed at the sky while long grass plays across his blue-white skin and open mouth. The victim is one of the other frat guys they interviewed earlier, and Benny snorts a little as he drops down to get a closer look.

“Can’t say I much fault the choice of victim,” Benny says. He’s crouching beside the body, dress pants stretching over solid thighs, framed by the mountains low on the horizon on all sides of him. They’re far enough out the air is full of the overlapping drone and rise and fall of insects instead of city noise. It’s a complicated statement, because the vic is the kind of person society misses—white, young, well-off—but he was also—Dean totally understands why someone might snap and scramble his brains.

Dean doesn’t argue, because he’s been trying to come up with a way to refer to a collective group of douchebags. There’s a pun on the edge of his tongue but he just can’t find it.

*

Dean’s about to knock on the door of victim number two’s upstairs neighbor when Benny reaches out to grab his hand before knuckle hits wood, tilting his ear towards the door. “Shit,” he swears, a second before a crash hits Dean’s hearing. The door is locked, so Dean backs up just enough to drive his heel hard into the door above the lock, wood splintering under the blow. Benny sweeps in behind him. The apartment lights are out and it feels a little like Purgatory, the silver cast of light and knowing so effortlessly where Benny is and that he has his back. Their guns are loaded with silver bullets, because Dean figures that if either head trauma or general stabbing with a silver knife will do the job, a silver bullet between the eyes’ll more than do the trick.

The scene in the living room takes a second to register. The upstairs neighbor is lying on his back on the ground, and it’s only his ugly-ass Hawaiian shirt that tells Dean it’s him, because his face is the melted, rotted visage of a wraith, with what looks like an ornately-handled ceremonial silver knife protruding straight up from his eye socket. Ashy gray smoke drifts from where silver is embedded in skin. There’s a short figure standing over him. It’s a woman. The skin of her right hand is crackled as if burned, and the face reflected in the window, staring back at them with hollowed-out eyes and slip-shod cheeks, is that of another wraith. She holds their gaze in the window, unmoving.

“Hands up, turn around slow,” Dean barks.

She complies, arms slowly rising overhead as she turns to face them, pulled back hair giving way to serious brows and heavy glasses.

“Doctor Isip, I presume,” Benny says, because it’s definitely the coroner from the morgue.

She stands, still and unthreatening and face unreadable, all sagging flesh hidden back behind whatever magic helps them pass. “I’m going to assume you’re not actually Agents Kantner and Slick,” she says. Her voice is steady, but her right hand, overhead, is shaking a bit. The patterns burned into the flesh look to match the ornate handle of the knife in the eye of the other wraith. 

“You wanna fill in some blanks here?” Dean asks, gesturing with his gun at the room. 

She laughs, short and sharp. “Does it really matter? You’re going to kill me.”

“I’m curious,” Dean says. “Like a cat.” Thinks about the fifteen-year service award on her desk. That he went back through years of records and the only wraith-looking kills he could find were recent. Thinks about how nothing supernatural ever happens in Provo. “Like a cat. Lover’s quarrel? Territorial tiff?”

She snarls a little at the suggestion, but her shoulders settle lower and more-drawn in at her body. “Didn’t curiosity kill the cat?”

“Satisfaction brought it back,” Benny says. “Besides, been there, done that.”

“Tell me a lie,” Dean says, because there’s a theory taking shape behind his eyes. His gun doesn’t waver.

“Why?” she asks.

Dean steps closer, and his gun doesn’t waver. “Humor me.”

“I enjoy you drawing this out,” Isip says. Says, “My favorite workdays are when white men swan into my morgue telling me how to do my job,” and, “That cowboy hat you walked into the morgue with looked completely natural and you pulled it off well.”

“Hey,” Dean says. One hand automatically goes to the cowboy hat he’s not currently wearing. “No need to get personal.”

“If it’s the only hit I’m going to get in, I’m taking it,” she says. Gravity has pulled at the edges of her sleeves, revealing rings of jagged scar tissue, silver in the moonlight.

Dean looks over at Benny. Benny nods, and Dean knows he has enough of a read on her heartbeat to tell when she’s lying.

“Can’t imagine dead man’s brain goo tastes too good,” Dean says. 

She shudders visibly. “I wouldn’t know,” she says. 

Benny winces in sympathy but his aim doesn’t waver. “You’d be surprised,” Dean says. He thinks about Lenore and her crew, the way their faces had twisted at the thought of cow. Thinks about what you’re willing to eat when there are two mouths and the money ran out a week ago. “You hurting anyone?” he asks.

“You think I’d be living on the curdled aggregation of dead brain tissues and cerebral fluids if I was hurting people?” she asks. “Doesn’t matter what I tell you though, does it? I need to be put down, don’t I?”

There’s a pale band on her ring finger where something used to sit. “You know him?” Dean asks again, gesturing at the corpse on the living room floor. “This a marital dispute?”

“No,” she says, confused and angry-defeated. “No, I have no idea who he was, other than the asshole who’s managed to get me killed.”

Dean looks over at Benny, raises an eyebrow. Benny nods. “She’s telling the truth,” he says, tapping one hand above his heart. He’s—he’s more withdrawn than Dean would have thought, more cautious, less approving.

“We never would have known about you, if you hadn’t come here,” Dean says.

“If I’d known you two were hunters, I’d be out of town already,” she says. “Letting this asshole murder his way through the local population.”

Benny snorts, shakes his head in a way that lets Dean know just how much of a lie it is.

“What are you waiting for?” Isip snarls. “Do it.”

Dean looks at the already-healing ornate burns on her palm, the ceremonial knife, the pale strip of a missing wedding ring that tells him her story is bigger than he knows. Dean thinks about the hot sauce on her desk, about how little supernatural activity he’d found records of here. Of the ‘do not disturb’ sign on his motel room door, the blood bags in the barely-functioning minifridge shoved in the corner under the window. Hears Benny snarling _Do it already _at him in that alley.__

__“Yeah,” Dean says, slowly lowering his gun. “Yeah, no. You want to kill yourself, you’ll have to do it yourself.”_ _

__Benny’s face is unreadable._ _

__“What?” Isip asks, with the clear-eyed confusion of someone given a reprieve from a known and creeping death._ _

__“Nothing supernatural ever happens in Provo,” Dean says. “Don’t suppose you know anything about that?” Then, because he’s definitely not above taking advantage of a situation: “You got access to the local blood bank?”_ _

____

*

Later, when the fires of the morgue crematorium are running hot, when they’re sliding the body inside to be reduced to ash and bone, Dean turns away from the radiant heat and looks at Isip. She’s skittish, still, keeps her back to the walls and away from Dean and Benny.

“Here’s the thing,” Dean says. Dean, who can barely remember the last time he felt like a human being. Who closes his eyes sometimes and finds himself reduced to the snarling, bloody thing he was in hell, or how Purgatory stripped everything human away from him and pared him down to nothing but an empty, clawing need to _hunt_. “We all get to decide what kind of monster we want to be.”

*

“What if she kills someone?” Benny asks. He’s been weirdly silent in the passenger seat.

“You think I haven’t thought about that?” Dean asks. He feels distant, disconnected from his body. “What if we kill her, and something she would have taken out kills someone else?” It feels different than Kate, than Lenore, where he’d just had to let Sam talk him into letting them go. Different than Benny, who he—whom he trusted, implicitly, who had proven himself again and again. He’s always—he’s always been able to let Sam be that voice of reason, be his conscience. 

“This ain’t because of me?” Benny asks.

“Don’t flatter yourself,” Dean says, but it’s not—he thinks anyone else would probably be surprised that Benny’s more in favor of a permanent death for Isip than he is, but Benny tried to throw himself back into Purgatory because he was worried he’d hurt someone. “She slips up, we’ll catch her.” _Sam said you weren’t planning on coming back,_ he wants to say. Anger flashes through him, unexpected and sudden and—Dean knows—entirely unearned. He grabs it and tries to shove it back into the box where he keeps the things he doesn’t want to think about it, the feelings he has no right to.

They sit there in the car, silently, for a minute or two before Dean turns the ignition over. 

“I like you in that cowboy hat just fine,” Benny says.

Dean grins. “Damn straight you do.”

*

_Wraith’s dead_ , Dean texts Sam, because he doesn’t want to talk about it. Doesn’t want Sam to tell him he’s gone soft because of Benny. Doesn’t want to talk about Lenore, who died screaming, or Amy, who Dean ended. He lies on his back on the motel bed, fully dressed, staring up at a suspicious stain on the ceiling.

Benny has the radio on low, soft jazz tinkling through the room as he packs his bag and Dean’s, shifts his newly acquired blood bags into the struggling fridge, puts fresh ice in the cooler. When he’s done he turns out everything but the small corner light, squeezes Dean’s shoulder before he crawls into bed.

What the hell was that, Dean thinks, lying awake and listening to Benny not-breathe the next bed over, drawing constellations in the pock-marked ceiling and wondering what stars Kate is under.


	2. Chapter 2

“You raring at the bit to get home?” Dean asks. He’s finishing toweling off his hair. His t-shirt sticks damply to the curve of his right hip, and he absently slides his hand up under the loose edge of his shirt to rub at the skin there before he pulls his plaid on.

Benny, sitting on the foot of the bed near the door, on Dean’s bed, shakes his head slowly and swallows. “I see what you meant about the mattresses,” he says.

“Yeah, we’ll have to do something about that,” Dean says. “We’ll pick you out a more comfortable bed,” he says. Feels his cheeks heat. “Get something for everyone,” he says quickly. Laughs. “Sammy’s supposed to be the smart one. What do you want to bet he’s still sleeping on a piece of shit, too?”

Dean takes them south out of Provo instead of south-east. Tries not to dwell on Isip, on the ragged scars on her arms and the way the window reflected her drooping face. UT-28 is one lane each way, unrolls mostly flat and even, wide plains to the distant, looming foothills and mountains. Other vehicles are rare. Small towns filter by occasionally, abandoned farmsteads crowding the road, gray-worn buildings that list at angles and have concave roofs, the weathered bones of old trees stripped of bark slipping by. The hills crowd up against them eventually, sandstone scraped back sharply to make room for the curving highways. 

Dean’s hands start to flex on the steering wheel sometime around the Salina Swell, and this entire thing, this entire detour starts to feel stupid, to feel silly and self-indulgent, like something useless he’s dragged Benny into by virtue of having him trapped in the car with him. 

“Whatever you’re thinking right now,” Benny says, “talk to me.”

“We’ll be back late,” Dean says, finally. 

Benny shrugs. “Can’t think of anywhere I’d rather be right now than here,” he says, honestly.

Dean’s shoulders relax, muscles in his jaw and stomach he hadn’t even realized were tight following after. “Me too,” he says, and turns away from the road long enough to smile at Benny, bright and surprisingly open.

The pass descends into the San Rafael Swell. The landscape flickers from dried-out mudflats with deeply fissured surfaces to wide expanses of rocks that split into thin, fine layers and fall off into canyons where squat, reaching trees clinging to the landscape. Here, the ground surges into diagonally-angled outcrops; there, isolated stands of distinctly layered rocks, time and wind and water wearing away at the less stable bits, but somehow carving the whole into something beautiful that’s still standing. He thinks about the sudden and violent way rain hits the desert, dark water wearing away edges and working its way deep in anywhere there’s space.

When Dean was little, he used to stare out the window at the deeply weathered hills, at the crags and gullies that looked like earth drawn over the sleeping figures of giants and wondering what would happen if they woke, earth rumbling and rolling back as they stretched and reached for the sky after long rest. What language would they speak, after all these years?

Dean wonders if growing up on the road eats its way into you somehow, if you build yourself around the distances you travel and the spaces you never linger in long enough to truly inhabit.

“You should let me take you out on the ocean sometime,” Benny says, watching out the window as the giants continue to slumber, warm under the earth.

“I’d like that,” Dean says, a little surprised by how much he means it.

*

The I-70 exits the Swell at Spotted Wolf Canyon, a serpentine series of turns and red-brown peaks looming overhead. It tracks along the edge of the Book Cliffs to the Colorado River and then back up into the Rockies. The curves of the road tighten through the canyons, sharper than on any other interstate Dean’s driven, speed limit dropping. Sometimes there are rock falls through here that close the road, but it’s open today, clear sky filling in the spaces between the dark rock of the towering mountains, the blue-green lakes that fall by.

“Makes me feel a little like a babe,” Benny says. 

“Yeah,” Dean says, even though he feels like he should be calling Benny an old man. It’s hard not to think about time, about how inconsequential they all are when they can see the pressed layered evidence of the geological time before them. Sam might know how old these rocks are, how and when they were formed. Cas would have seen it, would probably point at a formation and say something like ‘a plesiosaur who called herself Gertrude is entombed there.’ Benny leans back and takes it all in. His left arm is spread across the back of the front seat. His hand is close enough to Dean’s shoulder that Dean thinks he’d be able to feel the heat of it if Benny were human.

Dean takes the Loveland Pass rather than the Eisenhower Tunnel, a split-second decision made because he’s always wanted to see it, made because he likes the quiet warmth of the car and how bright the sky is and how Benny’s hand is so close to his shoulder, and he doesn’t want to lose any of that to the fluorescent lights and all-encompassing concrete of the tunnel and the pressure of the mountain looming over them.

Baby handles the turns and switchbacks easily, because Dean spends the time and energy to keep her running right, and Dean runs a hand along the dashboard in pride. “Good girl,” he whispers, low. Her engine hums just right as Dean plays out the accelerator and the continental divide carries them upward. 

“They know about plate tectonics in the 60s?” Dean asks.

“A bit,” Benny says. “Tell me.” 

“All of this,” Dean says, hand rolling out at the nearby blur of weathered rock, the striated bands of rock and sharp thrusts of more distant peaks, “All of this, from here right on down to the ocean floor, it’s nothing. It’s like—” It’s like skin, he thinks, a thin layer that can crack and break and stop holding back the hot flow beneath. He thinks about scar tissue and how it builds up. “It’s like ice sheets freezing at the edge of a lake. We’re all just—floating.” He clears his throat. “Except on _lava_ ,” he says, because that will never stop being cool. Benny turns to watch Dean and the mountains scrolling past him as Dean talks about how plates collide, about how pressure and force and friction build until even rock gives and reshapes the landscape. 

They stop at the pass itself, at the divide. It’s getting late, but Dean’s been driving all day, and when does he have a chance to do something like this, anyway? There’s a rest area and Dean pulls over, Baby’s engine ticking into the clear air as it cools. They walk for a bit. From this distance, from this close, the sharp edges of the mountains are blunted, the sharp falls and straight lines of the Rockies worn with wind and time and rockfalls and the growth of trees. Dean thinks of the Kansas heat and burrows a little more into his coat against the oncoming chill, hands deep in his pockets. He can feel in the air that it doesn’t get hot here, not like he’s used to. It’s June and he can see distant streaks and ridges of snow even now, a stark delineation of where accidents of geology and angles mean the sunshine never hits. It’s weird to see wildflowers pushing their heads through the grass against the distant backdrop of snow.

Dean stands here, next to Benny, staring out at the earth falls out suddenly in front of them, the way it soars back up again. 

“Think I’d like to see this in the winter,” Benny says. “See how the snow changes the shape of things, how it redraws the world.”

“Yeah,” Dean says. “We could do that.” It feels like a promise. The air here is thin, rarified, and Dean thinks that’s probably the only reason his heart is thudding in his chest, nothing to do with the majesty spread out before them or Benny’s shoulder pressed against his.

The sun sets quickly in the mountains and Dean knows the first edges of the peak eating away at the sun mean they should get back in the Impala. Instead, he stands, captivated, as the sky lights up orange and copper and pink, as the ranges fall into purple, hazy shadows one by one, as here and there tiny flickers of headlights and taillights trace out distant highways.

*

Dean’s flagging by the time they’re through the closest, sharpest parts of the mountain highways, and it’s still almost 400 miles to the Bunker. He’s running on a few hours of sleep the night before, even less than his usual sleep debt, and he’d forgotten how much more driving sharp turns along precipitous drop-offs took out of him, the thinness of mountain air.

“I could do with a bit of shut-eye,” Benny says.

Dean rolls his eyes. “You can crash out in the passenger seat or the back if you want. Just say you think I need a break.”

Benny snorts. “You need some sleep, brother, or you’re going to send us careening off into a ravine.”

“You’d be fine,” Dean grumbles.

“Of course,” Benny says. “Waking up in a gulley next to your dismembered body sounds like a perfect end to the day to me. ”

“Yeah, yeah,” Dean says, because he’s got another hour or two in him, but not good ones. Definitely not six. “I’d never run you off a cliff, Baby,” he tells the Impala, petting her dashboard.

Benny makes a muffled noise that’s halfway between a choke and a laugh, but when Dean looks over at him in the sweeping light of oncoming headlights he’s shaking his head and grinning wryly. 

The next town has a single motel vacancy light flickering. Dean pays and grabs the key. When he walks out of the office and back into the cold night air, the ‘no’ part of the vacancy sign flickers on, moths and other insects spreading themselves thinner to beat flickering wings against its neon light.

“Funny how you don’t realize how tired you are until you just - stop,” Dean says. Holds the motel room key up in his hand where Benny, leaning against the door, can see it.

“Real funny,” Benny says, and only the tone of his voice says ‘I told you so.’ At least until he says, “Too bad you don’t have anyone to point it out to you.”

Dean flips him off affectionately. Smacks at an insect buzzing around his head, makes a face when his hand comes away wet. There’s a streak on his hand, black in the flickering neon light. Benny’s nostrils flare the slightest amount. 

“Come on,” Dean says, and gets back in the car to move it down to the room.

*

“Huh,” Dean says, dropping his bag just inside the motel room door. The carpet is showing signs of wear but it’s not threadbare. There’s a single desk in the corner with a molded plastic chair. The overhead light doesn’t flicker, strikes a good balance between blindingly bare and gloomily dim. The entire room carries the faint lemon-bleach odor of chemical cleaners which at least means housekeeping’s been through recently. The wall art is mountains and lakes, sun-faded and reassuringly bland and predictable, given the locale.

There is only one bed. It’s a good-sized bed, taking up a good chunk of the room and staring at Dean with a mountain of pillows.

It is still only one bed. 

“Huh,” Benny says as the door swings closed behind him. Without the influx of night air, the chemical smell is stronger.

“Pull up a chair and stay awhile,” Dean says, because Benny still has his bag slung across his shoulder. 

“Last room?” Benny asks.

“Only motel for a mountain or so,” Dean confirms.

Benny’s hand twists on the strap of his bag. “I don’t mind sleeping in the car,” he says. “I won’t feel the cold.”

“Yeah, no,” Dean says, “that’s not happening.” Especially not now that Dean knows what kind of bullshit mattress Benny’s been sleeping on at the bunker. Dean looks around. The molded plastic chair isn’t an option. “I could sleep on the floor?” he offers, because there’s no way this place has a bathtub long enough for either of them to even think about it. “No, fuck that, neither of us is sleeping on the floor,” Dean says as Benny says, “You barely slept last night, and you’ve been driving all day.”

“I don’t need much sleep,” Benny offers, and Dean snorts.

“World of difference between ‘much’ and ‘none,’” Dean says.

“I’m not really tired anyway,” Benny says.

That’s a flat-out lie. Dean squints at him. They didn’t sleep in Purgatory but they rested, and it’s not like they never ended up huddled together against the rain or wind. “I call bullshit,” he says.

“You’ve got me,” Benny says, deadpan. “It’s the heady, masculine aroma of you. Don’t know if I can sleep, knowing how long it’s been since you changed your socks.”

“I’ll have you know,” Dean says, gesturing up and down at himself, “that multiple other vampires have told me I smell delicious.” He keeps his tone light because it’s - it’s weird if he’s a little hurt, with Benny looking at him like the two of them in a giant-ass bed is the worst possible outcome. 

“Dean,” Benny says. He has that serious tilt to his head he gets sometimes.

Dean looks at the streak of blood on his hand from the mosquito outside, thinks about the way Benny’s nostrils had flared, just a bit. “Please tell me you’re not seriously worried you’re going to eat me in my sleep,” he says.

“Dean,” Benny says, soft, and Dean rolls his eyes so hard he’s a little worried they’ll pop right out of his skull.

“Don’t be a dumbass,” Dean says. “We’re both too tired to deal with this kind of chick-flick bullshit right now,” he says, and stalks into the bathroom. He showers to get the road grime off of his skin. He’d showered this morning but he feels suddenly self-conscious about the smell of the day on him, with Benny looking at him like he’s the last thing he’d ever want to be in bed with. He’s not going to pretend he’s never thought about it, ending up in bed with Benny, but the circumstances always involved Benny looking at him like he desperately wanted to be there. Dean tries not to fall asleep under the warm spray of water, distantly grateful that he’s too tired for any of those old dreams to register in his body.

When he gets out of the shower, Benny is just - sitting on the far edge of the bed. Dean cracks a window so that some of the cool night air drifts in, pine and rock displacing the chemical cleaners. “Stop making this weird,” Dean says, crawling into the near side of the bed, nesting into the mountain of pillows. It’s either a surprisingly comfortable mattress, or he’s so tired that anything would feel like a cloud. Eventually, he feels the mattress shift as Benny turns off the light and lies down. The covers shift as Benny pulls them up around him. Dean is hyperaware of his limbs, the way his breath ghosts out from his lips. It takes far less time for him to fall asleep than he’d thought.

*

Dean wakes, slow and soft and warm. He floats there in that fuzzy-edged in-between place for as long as the languid stirring of his brain will let him. He feels quiet and rested and safe in a way he hasn’t for -- in a way he hasn’t for a long time, anyway.

As he comes gently awake, he picks out the warm rush of fresh air, the soft rustle of the curtain in the breeze, the distant rush of highway noise reflected off stone. He becomes slowly, gradually aware that at some point in the night, he had migrated into the middle of the bed, and it’s not just a nest of pillows cradling him.

He and Benny are curled up together. Benny is pressed up all along Dean’s back, nose tucked in behind the curve of Dean’s ear, mouth along the turn of his skull, beard prickling against Dean’s neck as his automatic breaths ghost against Dean’s skin. There’s an arm under Dean’s head and another slung across his ribs, and Dean appears to have pulled the hand up to rest on his heart, fingers tangled. Based on Benny’s response last night to the idea of sharing a bed he feels like he should be trying to untangle their limbs before Benny wakes but he can’t bring himself to move. Fully awake now, he feels his heart thump at the quiet intimacy of it. He’s not sure if that what wakes Benny, or the distant vibration of Dean’s cell phone, but either way Benny’s hand tightens in his before he slowly, softly begins to retrieve his arms. 

Benny props himself up on an elbow to smiles down at him. Their faces are close and his smile is a gentle thing without edges, none of the annoyance or awkwardness Dean would have expected. Dean guesses he’s hogging up all the awkward. “Good morning, sunshine,” Benny says. His accent is pronounced, slanting into French.

“Morning,” Dean says, and his voice comes out lower than he’s expecting. His phone buzzes again.

“You should probably get that,” Benny says. His eyes are a very clear, very pale blue, and he’s close enough that if Dean picked his head up off the pillow, their lips would touch. 

“Probably,” Dean repeats. He licks his lips, suddenly aware that they’re chapped. His phone changes from a text message vibration to the steady rattle of a phone call. He drops his head back into the pillows, not aware until then that he’d been raising it.

He and Benny untangle and pull apart. It’s awkward that it’s not more awkward. Benny disappears into the bathroom as Dean goes digging for his phone. He has five missed messages and now a missed call, which makes a lot more sense when he clears the notifications and takes a look at the clock. 

“Shit,” he curses and calls Sam back. It’s well past noon, the curiously yellow quality of the light spilling into the room making more sense. He hears the shower hiss on as Sam picks up the phone.

“Heyyyyy Sam,” he says. “So, everything’s fine.”

“Where the hell are you?” Sam snaps. 

“Had to find a motel.” Dean winces. He feels the soft comfort of the morning evaporate. He was due back before the sun, forgot to send Sam a message to let him know they’d be late. “Crashed before I remembered to send a text. ”

“And then what? You were too busy with some all you can eat buffet to give me a heads-up or respond to your messages?” Worry subsumed into anger, because Winchesters.

“Yeah, Sam,” Dean says. Dean rarely bothers to set an alarm because he’s awake in a few hours anyway, but they slept a good 12 the night before. “That’s it exactly. Bottomless bacon,” he says, because it’s easier. He has no idea where he’d start. _I accidentally got a good night’s sleep and I have no idea what to do about it?_ or _Benny’s just as good of a cuddler as he looks like he’d be?_ He’s suddenly angry that he’s lost that soft warmth, that the world has regained sharp edges and shadows. “Stop acting like a 90-year old schoolmarm.” 

“Christ, Dean,” Sam says. “I was worried, okay?”

“Yeah,” Dean says, and “sorry,” and “well, we’ll be back at 7:14 on the nose if you want to know when to send a search party out.”

Sam hangs up.

“Right,” Dean says. The shower in the bathroom hisses on. He stares down at the dark screen of the phone in his hands and tries to ignore the sharp thing starting to claw at his throat. He thumbs his phone back to life and stares at Charlie’s number but - what the fuck is he going to say to her anyway? 

They never really unpacked the night before so there’s not much to do, but Dean makes a pass through the room to check, poking under the edges of the bed and the nightstand automatically, checking his wallet and keys, realizing only belatedly that he’s doing a post-hookup sweep of the room. Which doesn’t even make any sense, because it’s not like they - it’s not like they actually did anything. 

Dean realizes suddenly, sharply, that he could probably count the number of people he’s slept beside and had to look in the face on his fingers. Lisa, Cassie. A handful of people whose paths crossed with his for a weekend, rather than a night. He went to exactly one sleepover growing up, because even if he’d had a chance to have friends someone had to look after Sammy. (The sleepover was a half sleepover, Dad pulling up around 2 am, Sam curled up against their bags in the back seat.) The only other reference he really has are him and Charlie dropping off during movies and growing up on the road with Sam and Dad; neither of those really apply to the situation with Benny. 

Dean throws a bag of blood into the tiny microwave to warm it up so he has something to do with his hands. Puts it in a go-cup when it’s done. Dean sits on the edge of the unmade bed, one hand resting in the messy sheets. If he didn’t know better, he’d say that he could still feel the residual warmth of them. He sits on the mattress and listens to the shower and waits for Benny and tries not to feel like a one-night stand who’s overstayed his welcome. He sits and he waits and when the shower cuts out Dean has a mental flash of Benny’s pale skin pinked up from the heat, profile framed in by the blue-and-white shower tiles, hair wet. He remembers the sharp-soft texture of Benny’s beard against the curve of his neck and inhales suddenly, sharp and dry. He smells the soft scent of sandalwood and he’s not sure if it’s drifting from the bathroom or trapped in the sheets or if it’s on his own skin. He feels hot all over, but especially along his back, where Benny was curled up against him, and he’s outside before he realizes he decided to leave the room.

*

Benny looms sideways into Dean’s vision. Dean’s lying back across Baby’s hood, cool press of metal comforting through his clothes. He’s staring up at the clear blue sky, the way the mountains loom in around the edges of his vision. His chest feels warm, and he’s not sure if it’s the sun or where Benny’s arm was tucked up against him.

“Ready to go, Chief?” Benny asks, but there’s something flat in his voice. 

“Yeah,” Dean says, sitting up, letting his feet slide to the gravel lot, staying perched on the hood. There’s something in Benny’s voice that sounds a bit more like wariness, like fear, than the weird run away/run towards curling in Dean’s stomach, and that fine line of fear sours Dean’s insides in an entirely different way. He crosses his arms against it. Benny’s hanging back, just a bit. “Temperature okay?” he asks, nodding, because Benny’s clutching the go-cup Dean left him.

“C’est bon,” Benny says, unwinding a bit. “Merci.”

“Good,” Dean says, deliberately uncrossing his arms and opening up his stance. “Sam’s got his panties in a twist, so we should probably get going.”

It’s the same kind of day it was yesterday - bright, mostly cloudless, and the mountains are the same - but Dean finds himself suddenly, violently missing the soft, calm quiet of the morning of the day before. He can’t quite manage to lose himself in the yellow lines unspooling before him, and Benny’s arm stays beside his body rather than stretched out over the seatback. Dean unrolls his window just a bit so that fresh air floods the car and he can drive with his hand out the window, fingers tapping against the roof, until the cold whip of air drives him back inside.

“See what I mean about a good mattress,” Dean says, finally. 

Benny laughs like it’s been surprised out of him, like whatever he’s been waiting for Dean to say was something completely different. “I sure do, brother,” he says, low and broad, another huffing laugh leaving his chest. “I concede.” 

The silence then is easier, as the mountains sink, unspool to foothills, give gradually to plains that open the world up around them, but it’s nothing like it was yesterday as the desert gave suddenly to mountains. Dean’s eyes keep flickering from the road to Benny to his hands on the wheel. The wrap is getting worn. He’ll have to replace it soon. “Tapes are in the glovebox,” he says, because reception in the mountains has always been shit. “Beside the salt and goofer dust.”

Benny digs around obligingly. “What are you feeling?” he asks.

 _Like there are tectonic plates grinding inside me_ , Dean thinks reflexively and unexpectedly in the half-second it takes him to realize Benny means music-wise. _Too much pressure building_. “Your choice,” Dean says. “Pick something you haven’t heard.”

Benny snorts, soft clinking and rustling noises and he digs around. “I ain’t heard much of it.”

“Pick whichever one you think my writing’s prettiest on, then,” Dean says.

“No one in this damn century knows a thing about penmanship,” Benny bitches, and it’s enough to set him off on a familiar rant that Dean can relax into as the Eagle’s Desperado fills the car and the foothills fade into their inevitable conclusion. There might be something a little different, a little more present, in the way Benny smiles at him from the passenger seat, but Dean’s not going to question it. 

When the tape flips over, there’s barely anyone else on the road around them. _He kinda had a craving for somethin` no one else could see_ , Meisner sings.

“Told you,” Dean says, wiggling his fingers at the flat expanses of the midwest, open fields and grass brassy for want of rain. “All in one piece,” he says, deliberately tilting his head away from Benny to bare his unmarked neck.

*

Sam is a disconcerting kind of cool when they get back. Like he’s trying for being a real chill kind of dude but getting trapped somewhere around frosty instead. There’s a stiffness to him that Dean worries is due to a relapse of whatever the hell the trials were doing to his body.

“What the hell, Dean?” Sam asks.

“Shame twinkies?” Dean asks, grinning wide and waggling the wrapper like that’s going to distract from the fact that Sam just caught Dean going through his garbage. “You know what they say - it’s when you start hiding it that you know it’s a problem.”

“You have absolutely no room to talk,” Sam says. 

Dean flinches, just a little. Grins against it. “Or I know exactly what I’m talking about, Sammy.” Purgatory stripped away hunger, stripped away thirst. Stripped away so many kinds of need. He wonders if Sam’s even noticed how much less Dean’s been drinking since he got back.

“I repeat - what the hell?” Sam says. At least he looks less distant.

Dean shrugs. “You were acting weird,” he says. “Wanted to make sure you were okay.”

Sam grabs the wastebasket from him. “By going through my _garbage_.”

Dean just blinks. “Obviously. You’re avoiding me.”

“I’m not avoiding you.” Sam drops his wastebasket back in the corner. “What were you even looking for?” he asks. His room could still easily pass for almost any other one in this hall.

Dean thinks about scarlet on the winding sheets around Benny’s body. About finding blood-covered tissues hidden in the library. “Wanted to make sure you hadn’t forgotten to mention that you were hacking up your soul again or whatever.”

Sam’s face softens. “Dean -” he says. Stops. “I’m not - I’m fine. I promise I’d tell you, okay?”

“Cas said the trials were damaging your soul in ways even he couldn’t heal,” Dean says. “And let’s be real here, your soul has a few more miles on it than most.” 

“Yeah,” Sam says. “Thanks, hadn’t thought about that lately.”

“Don’t act like you’re the only one who’s been to Hell,” Dean says. He rolls his eyes but he thinks of blood in his mouth, about Cas’s hand deep in Sam’s chest searching for something that wasn’t there anymore. The scars that come from piecing a mind back together. He thinks about the intricate linework burned into Issip’s hand by the silver knife, and he goes suddenly cold. “Okay then,” he says, forced cheer as he dusts his hands off. “Glad we got that sorted out.”

“You were worried enough to go through my garbage and you don’t even want to know what it actually is?” Sam asks.

“Nope,” Dean says, popping the ‘p.’ “Guess it’s just your time of the month,” he says, well aware that Charlie would ‘accidentally’ shoot him with a crossbow if he ever said that to her.

“I talked to Charlie,” Sam says.

“Good for you?” Dean offers. He didn’t - he didn’t exactly tell Benny not to say anything about Isip so he guesses he shouldn’t be surprised he told Charlie. He is, though. He thought something about the dark weight of the night was too quiet to talk about it. Dean just - doesn’t want to deal with it, doesn’t want to deal with Sam’s questions or superiority or concern that Dean’s gone soft over Benny. Doesn’t want to talk about what made Isip different from Amy. “Look, I’m tired. Long drive.”

“Yeah,” Sam says. “That’s what I - why didn’t you just tell me you took the scenic route back?”

Dean feels like he should unfreeze a little at that but he feels just as much tension in his jaw and the small of his back. “I don’t know,” he says, forcing his fingers to relax, “why didn’t you just ask me about it?”

Sam snorts and tilts his head towards the garbage can.

“Charlie didn’t tell you that, too?” Dean asks. He needs to know the parameters of this engagement.

“Okay, it’s less that I talked to her and more that I saw the pictures on her phone,” Sam says. “Benny texted her some photos.”

“I dunno,” Dean says, trying to find the words. Trying to find something to say that doesn’t sound dumb, doesn’t involve the way the mountains wrap around you, doesn’t mention Benny’s hand on the seatback, close enough to Dean’s shoulder to touch. “Just felt like it, I guess,” he says.

“You know that you’re allowed to want things, right?” Sam asks. “You get to do things just because you want to.”

Dean looks at how sparse Sam’s room is. “That’s not what you say when I eat pie for breakfast,” he says.

“Looking at mountains isn’t going to give you a heart attack at 43,” Sam says. “And I don’t understand why you’d spend any more time in the car than you have to, when you’ve spent so much of your life in it, but…”

“Do you remember Big Bend National Park?” Dean asks. Reaching for some shared ground or—“We were - god, I don’t even know. I was driving, so you had to be at least twelve.” Less that John had cared about underaged driving - Dean had learned to drive as soon as he could reach the pedals - but Dean getting pulled over for driving underage could have brought the kind of attention they were looking to avoid. “Dad was off with a ranger buddy somewhere, and we spent the afternoon skipping stones.” Dean thinks about it sometimes. The smooth heft of the rocks in his hand, the hours spent showing Sam exactly how to flick his wrist so the stones would skitter across the water surface. Afternoon full of heat that should have been oppressive but somehow seemed light and airy without Dad’s presence.

Sam shakes his head. “Not really. I think of the Rio Grande and I mostly think of The Catcher in the Rye.”

That’s probably what Sam had been reading in the passenger seat when they rolled out, then, Dean thinks, with the south Texas plains spread around them, red dust and thorny brush, mesquite and acacia. He thinks of a hundred other afternoons. Suddenly doesn’t want to talk about this. Doesn’t want to know if Sam will laugh or if it’ll be like that one time they were dead and in heaven, tearing through all of Dean’s best memories and none of them even registering for Sam.

Sam shifts. He looks - concerned or something. “That’s not--”

He feels a little hollow, realizing only now that Sam didn’t grow into it in the same way, didn’t build himself around the long stretches of highway and golden afternoons. Dean just wants to hold this picture close in his heart, of yellow sunshine and driving with one arm out the window while guitar and bass thrummed and Sammy bopped along while he read. It’s a memory both strikingly specific - he can taste distant rain in the air, feel the grit of dust in his teeth, see the fine hairs at the turn of his wrist illuminated by the sun - and a soft-edged composite of a thousand afternoons burned into his soul.

“Nah,” Dean says. “I get it. The road, it - you weren’t active in it, on it, in the same way. Dad I would drive, and you just - you just got carried along.”

“Dean,” Sam says, and he has that stupid big-eyed look that means he wants to talk about it, but Dean feels raw and brittle and his misses this morning, waking up warm with Benny beside him. Hates that he feels fragile, so he does what he always does, which is take everything he doesn’t want to be feeling or thinking about and he shoves it in a freaking box. 

“Seriously,” Dean says. “Mattresses for everyone. I’m disappointed in everyone for not looking after their spines.”

*

If there’s one thing Dean’s good at, it’s smiling pretty while he kills things. If there’s two things, the second is pretending that shit is normal. (The second is probably fucking up, but he’s good enough at pretending that he can cross it out.)

Isip goes in the box. Sam’s careful voice saying _he wasn’t planning to come back_ goes in the box. The Catcher in the Rye goes in the box. Dean likes where his life is at right now, so Dean’s brief and embarrassing turn into a touch-starved monkey goes in the box, because he’s not going to risk sending Benny running for the hills. He’ll be damned if he’s going to let a good night’s sleep get between them. He doesn’t want to pull back and give Benny any reason to worry that - Benny finally seems a little less concerned he’s going to snap and eat Dean, and Dean wants to encourage that. Benny laughs a little less self-consciously, seems a little more present, somehow. Takes the piss out of Dean the same as he always has.

Dean knows that Benny’s nest was tight. That they spent a lot of time in close quarters on cramped boats. That they moved sometimes as a pack, almost breathing together, swaying with their maker’s desire. But before that —

 _did dudes use to touch each other more_ Dean googles, then gets distracted. After a few minutes, he hits the back button a couple of times, turns safe search on and repeats the search.

“Huh,” he says, because apparently old-timey dudes use to platonically hold hands and sit on each other’s laps and even kiss each other full on the mouth, which all sounds kind of fake to him. He has a mental image of a couple of dudes getting caught making out in a black and white alley somewhere, flickering film grain over a silent movie card reading ‘why, what perfectly heterosexual behavior.’

Sam might be the research guru, but Dean’s not exactly shabby, when he has to be. And when he’s not getting sidetracked, it looks like it’s true - dudes did touch each other a lot more, though he’s also totally sure that people use it to ignore dudes who were Totally Banging because it’s more comfortable. It looks like - okay, it looks like that even today, in a lot of the world, guys will just kiss each other on the cheek in greeting, walk around hand in hand, and it means nothing. 

The thought of some guy Dean’s not intimate with just - going in for a kiss or holding his hand makes his skin feel weird and tight, and he wonders if Benny feels something like that in reverse, if the isolation and lack of touch means he feels the press of his shirt against his skin, the cuffs of his jacket more vividly against the turn of his wrists. He wonders if a half-century of Purgatory makes you feel every touch and lack thereof more brightly. 

Dean knows that Benny sleeps with men. He doesn’t know if Benny does more than that, though - he’s never heard Benny talk about a man the way he talked about Andrea, about his wife. And even if Benny _is_ into dudes, that doesn’t mean -- 

Benny touches people. He brushes past them in the hall. Lets Charlie use him as a footrest. If Kevin ends up pressed up against him in the back seat of the Impala, he just shifts his arm up, draping it along the back of the seat so he has more room. Benny’s fingers brush against people when he hands them something. When they’re out hunting, he puts comforting hands on the shoulders and forearms of frightened civilians, lets them turn into the welcoming shelter of his arms. If they want. Dean thinks about that photo of Benny and Elizabeth, smiling into the camera, Benny’s arm friendly around her as she leans against him. 

And Dean - Dean can let Benny do that. If he misses touch. If it helps him know that Dean isn’t worried Benny’s going to eat him.

Dean’s so focused on compensating by not pulling away that it takes a while for Dean to realize something else. Kevin’s post-MarioKart fistbump turning into a wrist clasp and shoulder bump. Charlie, bearing a still-warm basket of laundry, dropping down right next to him on his bed where he’s sprawled out, listening to music, her hip pressed against his as she chats and folds laundry. Benny’s chair closer to him in the kitchen, Benny’s hand lingering at his shoulder or low on his back when Dean passes him in the hall, the kitchen, the library.

It isn’t until Charlie is perched on Dean’s shoulders that it hits him. 

They’d somehow decided that the best way for them to get at an artifact on the top shelf in the storage room was for Charlie to piggyback on Dean, because the ladder was a good five to ten minutes away on the other side of the bunker and neither of them feels like walking it. Clearly, Dean thinks, looking at the dusty shelf in front of him and bracing, just a bit, against Charlie’s swaying weight, this is was the most logical option. He holds tight to Charlie’s knees and stares at the runes carved into the box in front of him, the way that dust and time have filled in the grooves, and realizes how much of the shape of his relationships is defined by where he chooses to pull away.

“Huh,” he says, an almost-unintentional exhalation that stirs the dust and makes his nose and eyes itch.

“Got it!” Charlie crows. Dean fights a sneeze. She passes the preserved sheep’s tongue down to him and then slides down off his shoulders with surprising grace. “What ‘huh?’” she asks.

Dean shrugs. “Just thinking that I could really go for some lamb chops,” he says, but he lets her link her arm through his on the way out of the storage room because Dean is nothing if not a stubborn son of a bitch.

He wonders what it says that his relationship with Sam hasn’t appeared to alter much. Maybe it’s too set, tracks and patterns of it worn too deep for it to shift easily. Maybe it’s just that Sam is a very different person than Charlie, than Kevin, than Benny. That his ideas of personal space and boundaries are drawn both more broadly and more firmly. 

Sam and Dean did grow up under the same shadows, after all.

*

Jody calls on a Thursday. “Got what I think is a vetala here,” she says.

“They hunt in pairs at the minimum,” Dean says.

Jody huffs. “Yeah. Could use an extra set of hands, if you don’t have anything else going.”

“Of course,” Dean says. 

Sam and Kevin are neck-deep in a translation, and when Charlie hears she says, “There’s a badass lady hunter and no one’s introduced me yet? Rude,” so she and Dean pack up and head out. Dean doesn’t think about how he’s not ready to be in a car again with Sam, not yet.

“Sam, how you’ve grown,” Jody says dryly when Dean and Charlie pull up, gravel shifting under their feet as they get out of the Impala. Jody’s in uniform, elbows propped comfortably against the hood of the police truck behind her.

“Jody, Charlie,” Dean says. Leans into it when Jody hugs him.

“You’re the one who figured out that Borax works on Leviathans, right?” Charlie asks. “Have you figured out the vetalas’ feeding range? Any idea who we might be looking for?” She bounces on her toes in her Fed shoes, just a little. “Oh, right, sorry, nice to meet you. Guess that’s where we start.”

Jody grins. “I like her,” she tells Dean.

“Thanks,” Charlie says. “And, okay, normally I would love to explore that more, because - who doesn’t get excited when people like them - but -”

“Yeah,” Jody nods. Picks up the folder sitting on the hood of the police truck and hands it to Dean. “At least one of the victims went missing from a truck stop near where the I-90 and I-29 meet,” Jody says. “Could be a lot more victims than we know about if they’re targeting transient populations.”

“Right,” Dean says. “Charlie, remember which ID you use. We’re through here enough we need to be consistent.”

*

“This is the plan?” Charlie whispers. She’s crammed in the booth beside Dean, picking absently (nervously?) at the peeling laminate edges of her menu.

“I mean, yeah,” Dean says, pausing with his coffee halfway to his mouth and one eyebrow raised.

“This,” Charlie whisper-snarls, leaning over the peeling plastic laminate of her menu to whisper angrily at Dean and Jody, even though the steady hum of the restaurant covers most conversation.

“Yep,” Jody says, flagging down the waitress. “Hey, Marlene, could I get a house skillet?”

Marlene is much younger than her name suggests, seems flustered, tired. “Right,” she says, scrambling in the pockets of her burnt-yellow apron for a coil-bound notebook. 

Dean smiles pretty at her without intent, and she flushes, inhales, and settles. “Number nine, eggs over-easy.” Thinks about how viscous yolk oozes out when you slice one open. “Make that scrambled.”

“This is the plan,” Charlie mutters again. She’s clearly been using the menu to work out some of her frustrations rather than pick out food.

“Denver sandwich, side of blueberry pancakes and fried green tomatoes for my friend,” Dean says, because Charlie is fucking weird sometimes. The waitress repeats it back and Dean nods, disarming.

Jody stirs sugar into her coffee. “You learn pretty quick that every moving part in a plan is just another piece that can break.”

“Nothing ever runs smooth,” Dean says. As far as truckstop coffee goes it’s pretty good, which is to say that it’s a couple of steps removed from diesel fuel. They’ve already interrogated the witnesses and chased down one supposed victim who turned out to be less missing than initially thought (heard his mistress and his wife had found out about each other and had become terrifyingly good friends). Now they’re working on plan B, which is basically ‘wait around where a bunch of people have gone missing and wait for a pair of suspiciously attractive people to come in.’

“But WE’RE a group of suspiciously attractive people,” Charlie hisses.

“Patience you must have, my young padawan,” Dean says.

“Oh, shit,” Charlie says, looking at him wide-eyed.

“Oh, shit,” Dean repeats. “Did we -”

“We forgot about Star Wars,” she confirms.

“HOW?” Dean asks.

“I’ll start downloading as soon as I have my laptop,” she says. “We can show him when we get back.”

“Original trilogy only,” Dean says. He already has his phone out and he’s texting Benny. _Gonna blow your mind when we get back_ , he texts.

Charlie snorts. “Duh.” 

Dean tries to remember if she’d had an Padme Amidala bobblehead in that first apartment they’d found her in. “Right?” he asks

“Oh, yeah, definitely,” she says. “Definitely 100%. No need for us to look at Natalie Portman or Ewan McGregor.”

Dean sighs dramatically. “Ugggh,” he says. “Fine, have it your way.”

She hooks her chin on his shoulder to peer down at his phone. “Ummmm,” she says. 

Dean looks at what he sent again, and rolls his eyes at her to try to distract from his cheeks getting just a little red. _Charlie and I realized we’ve left an unforgivable hole in your education,_ he sends.

“Much less ambiguous,” Charlie says.

“It’s not like he was going to go there,” Dean says. “There’s a world of difference between ‘into dudes sometimes,’ and ‘into me.’”

“I can vouch for that,” Jody says.

“Uh-huh,” Charlie says. 

“Thanks,” Jody says, smiling at the waitress as their food gets deposited in front of them.

Charlie points half her sandwich at Dean. “What about that cop in Wichita?” 

“He was pumping me for _information_ ,” Dean says, and steals a blueberry pancake while she’s distracted.

“Information like your _phone number,_ ,” Charlie says.

“Which is something he was going to need to _pump me for information_ ,” Dean says around a mouthful of eggs. 

“He wanted to pump you, all right,” Charlie says, snagging a sausage from his plate. “Shut up,” she says, scowling at his waggled eyebrows and maintaining eye contact as she bites down deliberately on the sausage.

“Hate to break this up,” Jody says, leaning across the table towards them, “but look at what just wandered in.”

Charlie leans around Dean to peer, settles back when he grumbles “subtle,” at her. The pair that has walked in is preternaturally attractive, looking at the occupants of the truck stop diner with predatory interest. If they weren’t already looking for vetalas, Dean might chalk it up to the self-awareness of some of those who live by their looks, but it lifts the hair on the back of his neck.

The man catches Dean’s eye, and Dean slouches back suggestively, head tilted, forehead and mouth set in his best dumb jock torpor. 

“Here we go,” Jody says.

*

Dean kind of likes vetalas, or at least he likes that after you kill them they’re courteous enough to take care of the cleanup themselves, bodies crumbling into dust. His least favorite thing is that he just KNOWS that he has vetala in his lungs.

“Hurry uppppp,” he hears Charlie call from outside the bathroom. “If I have to have that snarky Brit in my hair for any longer, I’m going to --”

“Awwww, muffin,” Dean yells, tugging a shirt over his head. “All yours,” he says, bowing exaggeratedly as he steps outside. She flips him off and slams the door in his face as he laughs.

Jody’s in the kitchen, hanging up the phone. “Pizza’s on the way,” she says. She’s got a cut over her right eyebrow. Dean taped it up before they left the creepy cabin the vetalas were using as a base, wincing against the bruise already starting to spread its way up his ribs.

She hands Dean a beer and they wander out onto the back porch, screen door slamming a little behind them. He rests his elbows on the railing, looking out into the green. She leans against him, just a little, like she’s checking something. “You and Charlie?” Jody asks.

Dean laughs. He thinks he can still feel some vetala rattling around in there, but it feels good. “You’re more her type,” he says. “But if you’re checking, she’s seeing someone.” He thinks she’s seeing someone anyway. Charlie gets this anxious, far-away look in her eyes when her phone buzzes, but she still answers it, smiling. She comes back from dates by turns fluttery and floaty and in need of movie nights. If he was anyone else, he’d think he should talk to her about it. He should probably talk to her about it.

“You and Sam usually come as a pair,” Jody says.

“That kind of deduction how you ended up sheriff?” Dean asks.

Jody digs her elbow into his ribs. “That kind of deduction is how I ended up saddled with you,” she says.

“Fair,” Dean says, hissing against his bruise. “We’ve got a couple of extra sets of hands in the Bunker right now. Charlie, Kevin,” he says. “Benny.” He picks at the label on his beer. “Kevin’s a prophet.”

“Yeah,” Jody says. “I’ve met Kevin.”

“Right,” Dean says. “Benny is--” Takes a long, cold pull from his beer. “This is good,” he says, actually looking at the label. It appears to be some kind of fancy, small-batch microbrew. There’s a freaking flower on the neck. “If you tell Sam I said that, I’ll-”

“You’ll what?” Jody asks. She instinctively cocks her eyebrow and hisses when it pulls at the cut.

“I’ll deny I’ve ever even met you,” Dean says with a great deal of dignity.

“Uh-huh,” Jody says. “That sounds real likely to fly.” She pats his hand. “Don’t worry, your secret is safe with me.”

“Benny is -” Dean picks at the label. The flower is red and tropical looking, and peeling at the corner pulls back most of a petal. “He’s the only reason I’m here right now, instead of stuck in Purgatory,” he says finally. Tries to think of Benny in terms of objective facts and not something warm glowing behind his sternum. “The only reason Sam’s not stuck in Purgatory,” he says, careful, slow. “The reason we got Bobby’s soul out of hell and back where it belongs.” There’s condensation under his fingers, beading against brown glass. It drips slowly down the neck of the bottle, the shoulder. “He’s also a vampire,” Dean says, looking up.

Jody’s leaning as close to him as she was before.

“And Sam already told you,” he says.

“Yup,” Jody says, popping the ‘p,’ and Dean really should have known as soon as she didn’t react to the whole ‘Bobby’s soul was in hell’ thing.

“You going to read me the riot act?” Dean asks.

Jody laughs. Drinks her beer. “I’m not your damn mother,” she says.

It’s easy for Dean to think of Jody as older than she is. For him to forget that she’s a hell of a lot closer to his age than to Bobby’s. Than to the age Bobby was. It’s probably some combination of the fact that she has a real-person job with a ton of responsibility. That she owns a house, had and lost a family. Rode herd on Bobby. He thinks about Elizabeth, wonders how old Benny’s kids were when he was turned, when he was taken from them. “I think you’d like him,” Dean says, and finds he means it.

“You seem tired,” Jody says. 

“Yeah,” Dean says. He hasn’t been sleeping less than normal since Colorado or anything, but. It feels a little like how it takes so much longer to train yourself out of hunger than it does to wake it again. A couple of good meals and your body remembers that food is a thing it can want. A good night’s sleep/cuddle, and all of a sudden your body remembers all the sleep you’ve never given it.

“Charlie’s a lesbian,” Jody says.

“Yep,” Dean repeats.

“So,” Jody says. “Ewan McGregor?”

Dean shrugs. “I mean.”

Jody laughs. “Can’t go wrong with Natalie Portman either,” she says. She leans comfortably against his shoulder. He closes his eyes and turns his face towards the setting sun and they just stand there until they hear the delivery car on the gravel out front.

*

Dean wakes in the quiet light of early morning, knows he won’t drop off again. It’s not unreasonably early in the morning, though, and he pads softly through Jody’s house. Through the windows, open to let in the cool night air, he can hear the distant sounds of a Saturday morning. A garage door opening, the repetitive click of a kid with a card shoved into the spokes of his bike wheels. Jody’s neighborhood is semi-rural, neighbors present but not crammed in close. Enough green space to muffle the noise of other lives but not the heavy buffer of Bobby’s salvage yard or the total isolation of the Bunker. Farther out of town than the house where her son had peeled her husband open.

Dean puts on coffee, automatically doing the double-tap and quarter-turn that Jody’s glitchy coffee maker needs to run just right. There isn’t much in the fridge, but there are eggs and the milk smells fine. He moves around the kitchen, pulling shit from the cupboards and trying to close the doors quietly, but it still wakes up Jody. She wanders in, barefoot and yawning.

“Pancakes okay?” Dean asks.

She hovers over the coffee maker like she’ll be able to absorb the caffeine via smell alone until it finishes. “No,” she says, mouth quirked. “I demand a quiche.”

“Too late,” Dean says. He’s already measuring flour, and there’s a cup of milk sprinkled with vinegar on the countertop, resultant buttermilk coming up to room temperature. “You care if I--” he asks gesturing at a couple of peaches sitting out on the counter. 

“If you can make use of my aspirational fruit, go for it,” Jody says, pouring out two cups of coffee and sliding one in front of Dean.

Dean shrugs. The flesh parts easily under his knife, and he tastes some to check. The fruit is overripe but not boozy, and he knows it’ll get thrown out if he doesn’t do something with it.

“Coffffeeeeee,” Dean hears, and sees Charlie staggering unsteadily through the living room. She’s playing it up, but the mussed hair and wrinkle in her nose are real because Dean knows she stayed up into the early hours playing some kind of online LARP thing, swearing and crowing not quite as quietly as she’d thought. “Ooooh, pancakes!” she says more brightly when she hits the kitchen. The bruise across her cheekbone is a green that’s a weirdly attractive contrast to her hair. Dean hands her a flipper and deputizes her, because Jody was good enough to put them up for the last couple of nights. 

They eat bacon and somewhat-singed peach pancakes in the backyard as the heat of the day and neighborhood noises begin to build, insect calls fading into birds and lawnmowers as the temperature rises. When Dean’s phone rings, they’ve objectively been done with breakfast for a while, lingering over nth cups of coffee gone cold while they trade horror stories from IT and drunk and disorderly calls and the most awkward excuses for having tossed holy water all over someone. 

“Hey, Sam,” Dean says, still laughing a little. 

“Hi Sam,” Charlie yells, leaning in closer so that the phone can pick up her voice.

“Hey, Charlie,” Sam says. “You’re still in Sioux Falls, then?”

“Yeah,” Dean says, stepping away from Jody and Charlie on the deck and into the grass. He waves at them to keep going. “What’s up?” There are green acorns in the grass, here and there, like squirrels got an early start in on the burr oaks that edge up against Jody’s yard. 

“Kevin thinks we have a crocotta in Amarillo,” Sam says.

“Okay,” Dean says. He nudges an acorn with his boot. Starts building maps in his head, overlaying highways on plains and fields. “There’s construction on the 14, but if we take the 81, we could back by-”

“Actually,” Sam interrupts. Coughs. “I was thinking Benny and I could handle it.”

“Right,” Dean says after a period of dead air. “And how does Benny feel about that?”

“It was his idea, actually,” Sam says. He sounds frustrated, but Dean thinks it’s directed at him rather than Benny, so that’s probably good. “You don’t think he can handle it?”

“No,” Dean says. “That’s not - he’ll probably be the one looking after your sorry ass.” He pauses. “You sure you’re up for this?”

Sam huffs. “Look, I’ve been indulging you, but I promise I am 100% committed to coming back alive,” he says. “No soul damage or anything.”

“Okay, then,” Dean says, and “Sam,” warningly, trailing off. There’s a lot going on in his head. He’s not sure what to say. His wrist aches.

“I’ll let you know when we get there,” Sam says. His voice sounds - not soft, not quite.

“Okay,” Dean says again. Tucks his phone back into his pocket.

“We heading out?” Charlie asks when he rejoins them.

“No rush,” Dean says. Texts Benny _if you wanted to get out of watching the prequel trilogy that badly you could have just said_. Sits back and drinks his cold coffee while Jody and Charlie talk about finding weapon grips that fit better in smaller hands.

Dean’s phone buzzes. _Running away to Texas with your brother seemed the better part of valor_ , it says. Buzzes again. _When we get back, I swear._

 _When you get back_ , Dean texts, and _don’t go radio silent on me_ , before he can think better of it. Then double-takes at Charlie and says: “wait, no, that’s not going to work. Sam is an absolute BABY about having rocket launchers around.”

*

“Do you want to talk about Parisa,” Dean asks, against his better judgment, while they’re driving. It pops out almost without his consent, thrown into the wide, flat expanse of farmland that unrolls around them.

To his relief, Charlie shakes her head. “You want to talk about whatever happened in Utah?” she asks.

Dean scowls at the traffic. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he says, and he really doesn’t. She could be talking about a lot of things. “I’ve been acting perfectly normal,” he says pointedly.

Charlie laughs. “Yeah, talk about a tip-off.”

“I could be normal,” Dean says. “If I wanted to.”

“It’s not really worth it, is it, though?” Charlie asks.

Dean shrugs. Fields fly by, cut here and there by cow-dotted pasture and the silver thrust of grain silos. He thinks about living with Lisa, about trying to have drinks with the guys from work. The 30 cuts southwest and train tracks follow, shadowing the unseen path of the Platte River and its shallow, braided streams. “It’s exhausting,” he says, miles later, when he thinks she’s probably forgotten, but she nods and understands.

*

Kevin had wanted to try to get a look at some giant, private esoteric library in Amarillo and Charlie has a date, so Dean has the Bunker to himself. He thinks about going out, to get a drink or hustle some pool or get laid or all of the above. He feels like he should probably want to, but his ribs hurt and the idea of trying to pretend like he’s a person makes him want to crawl into a cave and sleep until spring. (There’s also something - something about it that feels like a betrayal in a way that he doesn’t want to think about close enough to make it make sense.)

Instead, he lets himself indulge in a long, hot shower, staying there until the room is thick with steam and his skin is pink, bracing an arm on the cool tiles and letting the water work away at the muscles of his back. Hopes it’ll help him unwind enough to sleep.

It’s weird to have the place to himself, Dean thinks as he wanders through the halls. It’s even weirder to discover he doesn’t have the place to himself, though. “Didn’t you have a date?” he asks Charlie when he walks into the kitchen to find her staring a pint of ice cream. Tightens the belt of his robe a bit more firmly around himself. He knows she had a date, because he pushed it faster than he normally would to get around the construction and get her back in time to get ready to go out.

“Canceled,” she says. She doesn’t say who canceled on whom, but she’s still got her travel clothes on, and her hair is still up the same messy ponytail it was in before, like she walked into her room and flopped down on her bed before slowly reaching for her phone, so Dean can guess.

“Uh-huh,” Dean says. Looks over her shoulder at the ice cream, untouched but melting. He puts the lid back on and puts it in the freezer.

“Eating ice cream felt like the thing you’re supposed to do in this kind of situation,” Charlie says. “But it turns out I didn’t really want it.”

“Yeah, that happens sometimes,” Dean says. “Sometimes you don’t want the things you’re supposed to.”

“Oh my god,” Charlie says, and starts to giggle. “If that isn’t the mating call of every baby queer in the world.”

“I hate you so much sometimes,” Dean says, because he really, really doesn’t.

“Same,” she says, flicking water from the corner of her eyes.

“What do you want, then?” Dean asks.

She thinks about it seriously, twirling her spoon between her fingers. “Wobbly sets and pasted-on special effects,” she says.

“Okay,” he says. “We can do that.”

*

“So,” Dean says, looking at Charlie’s laptop. “Canceled?”

An alien that appears to be several emergency blankets and an afghan thrown over an extra stalks the Doctor across the screen. “I didn’t know what to say about the shiner,” Charlie finally says. “Yeah, there’s makeup, but it wears off, and --” 

An interdimensional portal opens up onscreen. It’s clearly been made by someone with an array of markers coloring over the original film. “Did you ever tell anyone?” Charlie asks. “About all of this?”

“Yeah,” Dean says.

“How’d it go?” she asks.

Dean snorts. “I’m here with you now, aren’t I?”

“Relationships end for all kinds of reasons,” Charlie says.

Dean tilts his head in acknowledgment. “Cassie broke up with me on the spot. Thought I was nuts,” he says bluntly. “Lisa thought I was, too, but Ben had been replaced by a changeling, so she figured out pretty quick I wasn’t messing with her.”

Credits wheel across the screen. Charlie snaps her fingers. “Cassie was the one with the-”

“-the racist ghost truck from Route 666,” he says. “Yeah.”

Charlie reaches out and tabs through windows to get to the next episode and start it. “You get that I know that’s not actually you in the books, right?” she asks. “Dean, I know the difference between reality and fanfic.”

“This doesn’t have to be reality for you, though,” Dean says. “You could - I don’t know, call up Parisa and apologize and roll out of here with everything you own in your trunk tonight. You can walk away. Kevin’s a prophet and you don’t get to walk about from that, but - you and Benny, you can leave. You can. If you were half as smart as you think you are, you probably would.”

“Wow,” Charlie says. The room is silent except for the Doctor Who theme, which seems just - wildly out of place.“Did you just try to shoo the dog at me? What am I, Wolf?”

Dean shrugs. “I have been told I’m a natty dresser.”

“Uh-huh,” Charlie says, looking at his plaid.

“I’ll have you know I own several vintage items of clothing procured from the literal past,” Dean says.

Charlie laughs and pokes him right in the middle of where she knows he’s bruised. “That was weak,” she says. “You barely even tried to drive me away. I’m kind of disappointed, honestly.”

“I had Cas wipe Lisa and Ben’s memories of me,” he tells her. Everything he did in hell, and it still feels like one of the worst things he’s ever done.

“Shit,” she says. “That’s -”

“It’s fucked up, yeah,” he says. He doesn’t offer any defense, and she doesn’t say anything about extenuating circumstances. They’re safer, but it’s still - it’s fucked up, and it’s never going to be a clean kind of pain. “I’m just saying - maybe you should talk to someone else about this. My track record is both extremely short and extremely bad.”

“Who else I am I going to talk to?” Charlie asks. “Sam? Hasn’t everyone he’s ever slept with died?”

“Amelia is fine,” Dean says. Pauses. Runs through a list in his head. “And as far as I know, Sarah Blake is still alive,” he says, like that doesn’t prove her entire point. “Talk to Jody?” he offers. “She was happily married.”

Charlie raises an eyebrow. “And how did that end, huh?”

“... her zombie kid ate her husband,” Dean admits. He feels like he should be giving her the standard talk. _People like us don’t get to have a home. Don’t get to have a family._ It’s what he told Benny. It’s what Dad told him, what Bobby taught him in what he didn’t say. But he - he has a home now. And he thinks about Jody leaning against him as the sun set, about Charlie beside him now, and family doesn’t always mean blood. “I’ve got no good answers for you,” he says. “I don’t know how to fix it.”

“I don’t actually need you to fix anything, asshole,” she says, tipping her head against his shoulder. “Just be here.”

They watch charmingly crappy science fiction and Dean tries not to think about Texas. That a crocotta has a mouthful of needle-sharp teeth and that to kill one you go for the neck. That it wasn’t too long ago Sam had actively decided to take off Benny’s head while Benny was trying to put something far too much like that down. Dean’s phone buzzes in his pocket and he tries to pull it out surreptitiously. Just wants to make sure everything is okay. It’s not that he doesn’t trust Sam, or Benny, but it’s just -

The text is from Benny. It’s a photo. A well-maintained, mint green 1962 Thunderbird with the top down and a heavily-tattooed woman at the wheel. 

“Nice,” Charlie says, reading over his shoulder because she has no respect for his privacy.

“Hey, Sam mentioned Benny sent you pictures from Utah,” he says. Texts _Charlie and i say yowza._

“Yeah,” she says, and flicks through her photo roll. It’s mountains and plains and skies. Dean can’t help but think of the picture Benny had, of him and Elizabeth, and notice Benny’s not in any of the pictures. Charlie scrolls past a bunch of other unrelated pictures, finds one last one to blow up and show him. It’s of Loveland pass. Of Dean. He doesn’t remember Benny taking it. Dean’s in partial silhouette, staring out against the peaks, hands tucked into his pockets against the chill mountain air. He’s framed against the peaks and valleys, blue sky before him, flash of yellow flowers at his feet.

“Huh,” Dean says. It’s weird, but he feels like he can see Benny in the picture somehow, even from behind the camera. “Why isn’t it saved with the others?” he asks, trying to cover the pause. 

“Saw it later and got him to send it to me,” Charlie said, vaguely.

“Could you --” Dean shakes his head. “Never mind,” he says, but his phone vibrates as Charlie sends it to him anyway.

“In return,” Charlie says, and flips her phone around to face them. Dean rolls his eyes but lets her pull him in and takes the extra second to make sure he only has one chin. She sends it to Benny with a weirdly intent focus. 

“It’s not like he doesn’t know what we look like,” Dean grumbles. 

Charlie rolls her eyes. “Yeah, that’s why people only have photos of complete strangers they’ve never met.”

“You could leave,” he says. Quieter. “You could. This life never ends kind.”

“Yeah,” Charlie says. Tips her head against his shoulder. “But who’s going to end ugly if I’m not there?”

*

It takes a few days for them to wrap up in Amarillo. The Bunker feels empty with just Dean and Charlie, which doesn’t even make sense. It’s been him and Sam against the world for most of their lives. The two of them in the bunker for most of the time since they found it. How is it that after a couple of months, it feels empty with two people?

He tries not to think about the fact that Charlie and Kevin and Benny all have rooms that look more like they live here than Sam does. 

Benny sends him pictures from the road sometimes. Most have no real explanation. Things he thinks are pretty or weird or out of place. Birds on a line. An amusement park, ferris wheel lit bright against the setting sun. Sam, asleep sitting up with his head back and Kevin sneaking up on him with a black marker. The Pac-Man arc of scrubland irrigated until it supports crops. A picture of a gas station snack aisle. _When in the hell did there get to be so many different kinds of Cheetos?_

Dean - Dean doesn’t know if there’s a hidden message or if Benny just likes to document everything, or if it’s the kind of wild technological abandon you get if you remember a time when sitting for a picture was an all-afternoon event. He thinks about the photo that Benny had, of himself and Elizabeth. How the edges were well-worn from handling. Benny wasn’t built to be alone. Not like Dean was, Dean thinks, rattling around a bunker that feels too empty.

He looks at the picture Charlie sent him, sometimes. The one Benny took of him. He’s never had too many pictures of himself. They weren’t usually around for picture day at school, and John wasn’t exactly documenting their childhood. Didn’t want a trail of evidence linking them to where they’d been. There were mugshots, of course. Posed photos like the one Charlie took the other day. A portrait with Lisa and Ben. 

Benny’s photo is different, somehow. He thinks, distantly, that he would like it if he was actually the person in this picture. His shoulders are strong but there’s a hint of vulnerability where his hands curl into his pockets. He looks like he’s thinking real and serious thoughts, but there’s a soft twist to the corner of his mouth. His weight is shifted to the left side of his body and Dean knows it’s because he wanted to take the weight off his aching knee, but he looks like he’s ready to burst into motion at any moment. He looks - he looks like a real and complicated human being.

*

Dean’s reading in the library when the others get back. He’s reading in a very specific and deliberate way that makes it clear he just happens to be there, and he’s not in any way waiting for them.

Objectively, Dean knew it was going to go well. Sam’s probably the best hunter out there, and Benny’s a vampire who did half a century in monster thunderdome. There’s not a crocotta out there who stands a chance. Sam and Benny haven’t been at each other’s throats. No one’s coughing up blood. It makes Dean pissed that he’s anxious or whatever.

“Hey,” Sam says, raising an eyebrow at Dean sitting there.

“Hey,” Dean says, voice firm because fuck that, Dean actually was reading. Mostly.

 _Okay_ , Sam says, but only in the way he pulls Dean into a quick shoulder clasp of a hug.

Benny pulls Dean into a closer, tighter hug, adjusting automatically when Dean favors his bruised side, just a little. Dean lets himself lean into Benny, just a bit, fingers curling automatically at the nape of his neck. “How’d it go?” he asks.

“Crocotta’s a hell of a trip,” Benny says. “Knowing they’re imitating someone you care about doesn’t make it any easier to deal with.” Squeezes him again before letting go with what a selfish part of Dean wants to think is reluctance.

“It must have been rough,” Dean says, prickly in his chest. “Hearing Andrea’s voice again.”

Sam looks back at Dean sharply. Dean’s about to ask a question when Kevin comes limping in.

“I thought you were staying in the library,” Dean says. “The hell did you do that?”

Kevin winces. Mutters something under his breath.

“I’m sorry, _what_?” Dean says, because it definitely sounded like Kevin said ‘humper stars,’ and if this is some weird pornstar related ankle injury he’s going to need either a lot more or a lot less detail.

Kevin mutters something again, a little louder, and Dean just blinks, because that doesn’t make any more sense. “Did you--”

“It was a bumper car, okay,” Kevin snaps.

Dean stops. Raises a hand. “A _bumper car_?” Dean asks. “Was it a haunted bumper car, or --”

“No,” Kevin says. He tilts his head up mulishly. “It was a regular bumper car. That I was riding because there was an amusement park, and I still hold some kind of joy inside my young and unshriveled heart.”

Dean laughs. “Good for you, kid,” he says, ruffling Kevin’s hair before he has a chance to bat his hand away.

*

“Come in,” Benny says.

Dean likes that Benny always waits for him to knock. If Dean was still a vampire, he would 100% be an annoying shit about his enhanced senses.

Benny is sitting on his bed, back against the headboard. He’s down to his shirtsleeves, suspenders pulling across his broad shoulders. There’s something about his crossed ankles, his toes beneath his socks that Dean finds utterly disarming. Benny looks as tired as Dean feels. 

“You’ve had a long day,” Dean says. “I can--”

“Kick off your shoes and stay awhile,” Benny says. Moves to the far side of the bed so that there’s room beside him. Pats the mattress.

Dean told himself he was going to act like nothing had happened in Colorado, but he still thinks about staying standing. He’s freaking exhausted, though, and he knows the arm on Benny’s chair is going to dig right into his bruised ribs. He sits carefully, toeing off his shoes with trepidation. “You can smell all kinds of things, right?” Dean asks.

Benny smiles. “If you’re worried about your socks…”

“You said take off my shoes,” Dean says. “You can deal with the eau de Dean.”

Benny laughs. It’s real, but it’s not deep enough to rumble his chest. “I can find a way,” he says. “And yeah. Got a better nose on me than you do, but it doesn’t exactly come with an interpretive guide.”

“I’m not -” Dean pauses. “I’m not asking for a play-by-play of everyone’s bathroom routines,” he says, because no, just no. “Sam,” he says, finally.

Benny raises an eyebrow. “Just Sam’s morning ablutions?”

“Gross,” Dean says, even though Benny’s grinning at him. “I just mean - there anything about him that smells off to you?”

“Off how?” Benny asks. “Boy’s a bit too fond of body spray, but-”

Dean clenches his jaw. Relaxes it. “I don’t even know. There was - the trials, they were doing something to his soul. Flaying it in ways that were going to kill him dirty, that reached back into his body and --”

“Ah,” Benny says.

“‘Ah’ what?” Dean asks.

“There was something,” Benny says. “When we got back from purgatory. Something that smelled a little like the way thin ice sounds when it cracks under you.”

Dean holds his breath.

“Smells like the sound ice makes when it’s a little thicker, now,” Benny says.

Dean exhales. “Okay,” he says. “Good. Great. You’ll let me know if--”

Benny nods. “Will do, chief.”

Benny seems worn down. Dean hadn’t thought what hearing Andrea’s voice might do to him. He fought his way through a half-century of Purgatory to avenge her, only to find that she needed putting down. Only to watch Dean put her down. “It’s hard,” Dean says. “When there’s something wrong, and you just - you can’t even see what it is. When you have no idea what to do.”

Benny laughs. “I understand completely,” he says. “Back when I was alive, medicine didn’t look much like it does now. Every time one of the kids got sick - you have to understand, a cut could kill you quick if your blood turned. Didn’t have antibiotics, didn’t have much in the way of vaccines. Most medication was snake oil, full of opium and cocaine. We had folk medicine and we had folk magic and we had a bit of real magic, and not much in the way of real medicine, not where we lived.”

Dean shifts a little, settles back more against the bedspread. “I can’t even imagine,” he says, because even when they didn’t have access to a hospital they had pilfered antibiotics, and Bobby did his best to make sure they were up to date on their shots.

“Florence got sick,” Benny says. His hands are very still in his lap. “She was our youngest. She got sick, and she wasn’t getting better. I couldn’t tell you what it was. She had a fever that wouldn’t stop burning, couldn’t keep even water down.” He pauses. “You ever wonder how I knew how to get us out of Purgatory?” he asks.

Dean shrugs. “Figured you picked it up from somebody trying to talk you out of ending them.”

“A little,” Benny says. “My grandmother was a bayou witch.”

“Grew up at her knee, huh,” Dean asks. He tries to pictures Benny small, in some kind of weird-ass period dress, face bare and smooth, narrow-wristed, human, knotting rough linen around small bundles of herbs. It’s hard.

“Not quite,” Benny says. “She loved her family both deeply and ruthlessly. She was prone to fits of darkness that my parents tried to shield us from, but god how she loved us. I picked up a thing or two, here and there, but I just wanted - I wanted to marry the milkmaid down the lane and put crops in the ground. And I did. We had fifteen good years.” He trails off, staring down at his still hands.

“And then Florence got sick,” Dean says. His stomach hurts for Benny. “You asked your gran?”

“She was gone by then,” Benny says. “Or I would have, no matter what the cost. I don’t think she was quite one thing or the other, light or dark, but I’d have paid anything.”

Dean can smell night air, feel gravel beneath his feet, under his fingernails. Taste sulfur on his lips.

“But Gran was gone, and I only had childhood-hazy snippets of spells to work from. I was desperate, though. I’d have tried anything. And you gotta know - they fired off cannons, then, to fight yellow fever. Thought it would clear the bad air, the miasma that was making people sick. So I kissed my wife and kids goodbye, and I headed in to New Orleans to try to find some half-remembered herbs.

“New Orleans was a port before it was a city,” Benny says. “And even when it was a city, it was a waypoint. People going and coming and going.” Dean shifts to press his shoulder against Benny’s, because he can see where this is going, _a perfect hunting ground_ hanging unsaid. One of Benny’s hands drifts to his own neck. “I’ve never known if the Old Man was out looking for someone to turn that night, or if it was a passing fancy. I don’t know what it was about me that caught his eye.”

There are a lot of things that Dean could say to that, but none of them feel right in the soft half-life, the light thread of music that winds through everything. He wants to make a joke about whistling competitions, wants to say something serious about the width of Benny’s shoulders, wants to let something he’s not ready to examine about the blue of Benny’s eyes bubble from his lips. He doesn’t say anything.

“I broke free of his control for just long enough to claw my way back home. I don’t know what I was thinking - that I’d turn her to save her, maybe, or that I’d somehow remember a spell now that my brain was on fire.” Benny breathes heavy. His hand rests with a fine tremble against his jugular. “You want to know what the stupidest thing was?” Benny asks. His voice has a note of self-recrimination that Dean finds all too familiar. “I got there, and I just - I watched from the shadows, and I could see her, moving around in the lamplight, frail but recovering.” The self-loathing builds. The hand hovering over his own neck trembles. Clenches. “And I could see her, and I could see her mother, and I wanted nothing more than to hold them down and drain them dry.”

“But you didn’t,” Dean says. “Benny, you didn’t.”

“I wanted to, though. What the hell kind of a father--” Benny hisses, clenches his hand, and Dean can almost hear his bones creaking with the stress.

“You didn’t,” Dean says. “Hey,” he says, trying to pull Benny’s hand away from his own throat. He knows Benny can’t actually hurt himself, not really, but it’s upsetting. “You didn’t,” he says. Raps his knuckles against Benny’s hand. Covers Benny’s hands with his, hoping that the heat of his skin drawing a line along the junction of Benny’s throat and hand will snap him out of it. “I hurt Ben,” he says, as Benny’s fingers relax. “When I was a vampire. You think I’m some kind of monster? You want to have a go at me?”

“I didn’t have the courage to off myself then,” Benny says. There are dark marks along his throat, fading quickly. “So I let that damn line in my heart that connected me to my maker, to my nest, reel me back in.”

 _He wasn’t planning on coming back_ Dean hears Sam say. _I tell you, it’s good to hear your voice_ , Dean hears Benny say. He thinks of standing beside Benny in the dark, watching Elizabeth move easily through the restaurant. Of Benny, standing alone outside his home and watching the family that would never know what happened to him.

 _End of the line_ , he hears himself say.

“It’s a hell of a thing,” Benny says. Quiet. “If I’d stayed - if I’d stayed there and I’d had faith, if I’d been there for them instead of running off hare-brained, I’d have grown old with them.”

“Gotta tell you,” Dean says slowly, carefully. “On a personal level, I’m real glad you landed in Purgatory with enough heads under your belt to last until I ran into you. For you to get me out.” He leans into Benny, and he is - god, he’s so tired. “I’m glad you’re here,” he says. “The entire thing, the entire situation, it sucks beyond the telling of it, and I’m sorry. But you’re here.” Tilts his head back against the wall. “I’m glad you’re here,” he says. Listens to the quiet hum of the Bunker’s air exchange and Benny’s soft, automatic breaths, and a man’s low voice crooning from the radio.

*

The next time Dean wakes up, he only knows that time has passed. The dim lights are the same, but it’s not exactly like there are windows in an underground bunker. Judging by the fact that he feels rested, however, and that the muffled radio has switched to some sort of talk program in a low, monotonous voice, he’d guess sometime in the actual morning.

Benny’s hand is resting over Dean’s heart, like the steady pulse anchors him somehow. Resting close to his tattoo.

Dean swears. Benny pulls away, just as sharp and sudden as Dean’s curse.

“Can vampires get possessed by demons?” Dean asks, forgetting to be awkward. His pulse surges.

“I have no idea,” Benny says, clearly thrown by the change in subject. His fingers flex a little, like it’s in response to Dean’s increased heart rate. His brow furrows. “We were born human, but I really can’t think of when it could be an advantage. They’re just as strong as we are. If I had to guess--” He stops, looks a little thrown when Dean scrambles off the bed. 

“Yeah, no, we’re not guessing,” Dean says, shoving his feet into his boots. Tries to remember if Charlie got any ink. “You’re going to have to shave,” he says, looking up from where he’s kneeling to tie his boots. Because he knows from Benny’s arms and unbuttoned dress shirts that he’s definitely got some hair on him. Not because he thinks about it sometimes or anything. He definitely hasn’t had the passing thought he could probably dig his fingers into it.

Yeah, he definitely thinks about it sometimes.

Benny’s on his side, face looking down at him with surprise. Dean pops up, unbuttoning the buttons on his henley.

“I’m sorry, what?” Benny asks. He looks like he’s lost the plot entirely.

Dean pulls the wide open neck of his shirt down so he can flash his tattoo. “Anti-possession,” he says. “Get your shit together,” he calls back behind him as he leaves.

“Charlie,” he says, pounding at her door. “Get up, we’re getting tattoos.”

*

The tattoo artist is a heavily pierced, rainbow-haired woman named Ethel who tries to talk Charlie out of getting it done on her ribs. “It’s going to hurt,” she tells her.

Charlie rolls her eyes. “The Princess Leia on my back hurt,” she says. “And I wouldn’t want it somewhere it would be visible where I was cosplaying something other than Carver Edlund,” Charlie says, leaning conspiratorially towards Ethel, who shakes her head and laughs. 

It’s true on the face of it. Charlie seems a little nervous, which makes Ethel raise her eyebrows a bit, because this is going to be much quicker and less complicated that the watercolor portrait across her back. But Dean had caught glimpses of Charlie in the rearview mirror as they drove, fingers playing across the parts of her body where she carries scars, cataloging, trying to figure out where she’s least likely to take a hit that will break the protection. 

“Awww, do you want to hold my hand?” Dean asks, wiggling his fingers in front of her face as she stares at the ceiling. Trying to settle her.

“Yes,” Charlie says, grabbing him instead of smacking his arm away or pinching his hip. 

“Fine, whatever,” Dean says, but he drags a chair over with his foot, legs skitting loudly across the floor, and drops into it without complaint. Sits there while she squeezes his hand and Benny leans against the wall by the front door. His arms are crossed and his hat is casually tilted back, but there’s tension in his jaw as blood and ink well from Charlie’s skin under the needle, bright overhead lights casting the gauze used to blot it up in stark relief. Dean feels his hand tighten a bit around Charlie’s. Not that Dean’s worried, but he just - thinks Benny doesn’t give himself enough credit. 

Charlie, other arm behind her head, raises her neck a little to look at Benny over the halo of Ethel’s afro. “Don’t be a baby,” she tells Benny, squeezing Dean’s hand comfortably. “You’re fine.”

Benny’s mouth tenses, lips tight. Dean sees him swallow, deliberately quirk his lips. “You keep talking like I don’t have a great granddaughter your age.”

Dean snorts. “You can be a baby or an old man. Choose.”

When it’s Benny’s turn, he hangs his coat and hat on the coat rack. For a second, Dean thinks he’s just going to roll up his shirtsleeve and get it done on his forearm, but his hands go to the buttons and he strips calmly and efficiently, sliding his suspenders off his shoulders, untucking his red button-up and folding it neatly across a chairback, pulling his undershirt over his head. He drops easily into the black leather of the tattoo chair, tucking his right arm behind his head to give the best canvas. It also gives a display of the solid strength of him, muscles chording as he pulls the arm back. Shows off the breadth of his shoulders, his chest. “Opposite the heart,” Benny says.

“I’m going to have to shave you,” Ethel says. 

And, yeah. Dean was not wrong about Benny’s chest hair being enough for someone (Dean) (someone) to dig their fingers into, to tug on. It’s a bit redder than the rest of his hair, fades away below his collarbone, the pattern of hair narrowing only slightly towards where his slacks cut across his hips. 

“Here?” Ethel asks, setting her hands against Benny’s pec in measurement, blocking off the area of the tattoo. Dean’s eyes track the heavier trail down the middle of his torso.

“Um,” Dean says, and shifts awkwardly. Benny’s nostrils flare, just a little, and Dean looks around for any unexpected blood.

“You have an opinion on this?” Ethel asks, razor and shaving cream in hand.

“No,” Dean lies, baldfaced, and watches as Ethel carefully and methodically bares the skin of Benny’s right pectoral, flicking lather into a small bowl of water and coming back with another drag of the razor. Dean’s mouth is dry, and when he looks up, Benny isn’t looking at the blade running professionally over his skin, so close to his neck, but at Dean’s face. Benny’s expression is something intense that is quickly smoothed over when Dean meets his eyes.

Ever since that - whatever it was - in the dressing room. When Benny didn’t respond to the concentrated cloud of hormones and desire that Dean had been sending out - when he didn’t laugh, friendly and disarming as he gently let Dean down, or lift Dean by his thighs and pin him to the mirror, or - 

Ever since then, Dean’s been pretty sure Benny’s sense of smell didn’t extend to lust. But now Benny’s looking at him with dark eyes, pupils blown, and Dean has to shift his stance, and he just - he - 

“There we go,” Ethel says, putting down the razor on the metal table.

Dean starts at her voice, and the rest of the room comes rushing back in. The Hendrix coming through the speakers in the corner of the room, the red and black tiled floor. Charlie talking low on her cell phone. The fact that his pants feel tight. He flushes. Turns to flip through a book of Ethel’s work and tries to unobtrusively tug his shirt lower, because even if Benny can’t smell him, he has _eyes_. And dude, he’s not freaking twelve, and it’s rude.

 _He can’t smell me_ , Dean decides, looking at Ethel’s clean, bold linework inked into skin. Mostly because any other way lies madness.

The tattoo gun starts up.

“Ain’t you gonna offer to hold my hand, too?” Benny asks, hissing as the needle hits flesh and trying to look as innocent and adorable as a hundred-and-some-year-old murder teddy bear can. “You’re hurting my feelings something fierce.”

“Awww, muffin,” Dean says, but it comes out less sarcastic than he means it to, because ‘how adorable’ is far more than Benny should be able to pull off, objectively speaking. “I didn’t mean to hurt your fee-fees,” he says, crossing his arms and blowing him a sardonic kiss. He realizes, suddenly, that Benny hasn’t touched him since Dean scrambled out of his bed this morning. No casual hand on Dean’s back as they walked into the tattoo parlor, no brush of fingers as they fight over the radio station.

Ethel, a professional, ignores them both and starts laying in the outline.

“So, while we’re in town,” Charlie says. Drifts off. Dean looks out the window of the tattoo parlor to the street below, where a dark-haired woman is leaning against a motorcycle, a second helmet balanced beside her.

“Don’t do anything I’d do,” Dean calls after Charlie as the door closes behind her, waves cheekily as she flips him off over her shoulder. Parisa raises a hand at him, turns away to touch it gently to Charlie’s still-green cheek.

“All good?” Benny asks as Ethel pulls back to check her handiwork. 

“Yeah,” Dean says. Manhattan is by no means the place closest to Lebanon with a tattoo parlor. “Looks like we’ve got at least a few hours to kill, though.”

*

Dean’s not really sure what kind of decision-making process ends with him and Benny killing time at the zoo.

The zoo has its own butterfly garden. “What the fuck,” Dean whispers, because this is completely separate from the butterfly garden Parisa took Charlie to on their first date, and because this city also has a full-on insect zoo. 

Dean, distracted by this information on the paper map he’s been handed, doesn’t notice until they’re inside that Benny’s paid for both of them. “I’ll get you supper,” Dean says, making a note to look into if there’s any kind of bug-obsessed nasty that could explain what the hell is going on with this city, or if it’s just a Kansas kind of way to fill in some empty space.

Dean knows that objectively speaking, it’s a small zoo. Won’t take them too much time to cover. He’s never really gone to a zoo, though. He helped supervise one of Ben’s class trips once, but it was - it was exhausting. He was so hypervigilant, constantly scanning the crowd for any kind of threat - monster or otherwise - that he barely remembers anything other than the stir of crowds, the rise and fall of helium balloons, the tan of fake stucco enclosures. It’s ironic that he’d ended up being the most dangerous thing Ben ever got exposed to, he thinks, seeing his hand contacting Ben’s face, seeing Lisa bleeding out in his arms.

They’re better off without him, Dean reminds himself, and lets himself laugh at the red pandas and their funny raccoon faces and bizarre snake bodies in a way that he probably wouldn’t if Sam were there. There’s something about Benny, something about Charlie, that lets him feel like he doesn’t _have_ to be anyone in particular. 

Benny is entranced by the Australian and African exhibits, which Dean guesses makes sense, since he’s spent more than a century circling the Americas. Dean leaves him staring, fascinated at the wallabies and continues to wander. Benny catches up with him while he’s staring critically at what the signs tell him are gibbons. They are dark-eyed, long-limbed, and expressive. “I think they’re closer to us than the colobus monkeys,” Dean says, feeling Benny settle beside him. “Not as close as the chimpanzees.” He’s never just - never just looked at a monkey before, and they’re startlingly human in the eyes. More and less human than a lot of the things he’s killed. He finds himself looking at monkeys and the chimpanzees and the gibbons in the same way he would monsters, looking for the small differences, the tells, that separate one kind of needle-sharp teeth from another. It’s easy to see that the chimpanzees are almost human. Maybe more human than him, some days, Dean thinks. “It’s the tail,” Dean says. 

Benny laughs a little. “Can’t say as I’ve seen many people running around with one of those.”

Dean nods. _It’s the tail_ , he’d said, but it’s more than that - it’s in how the monkeys had run along the branches, the breadth of the chest and shoulders in the gibbons and chimpanzees that let them swing from the branches instead. The shape of the face, of the nose.

Benny ambles easily along beside Dean, who stops when they get to the tigers, because, dude, _tigers_. It paces below them, and Dean can smell the heavy, dense musk that seems to float around the pens of the large carnivores. It triggers something in the same monkey part of his brain that can tell when he’s walked into the nest of something that used to be human but now wants to eat him. Benny smells similar, just a little, under the sandalwood, a sharp warning scent that makes the blood thrum in Dean’s veins in an entirely different way, because Dean’s always been wired a bit different.

Benny shifts beside him, going stiff, and his face distant. He doesn’t look at Dean, and Dean swears at himself just a little. Is glad that Benny can’t pick up that sharp, short burst of arousal. Wonders if this is about last night. Dean guesses the awkwardness had to catch up with them sometime.

“So,” Dean says, leaning on the railing beside Benny, who doesn’t move into him like he normally does. Dean looks at the grain of the wood between their elbows and feels his stomach sink. Thinks about his hand on Benny’s neck last night, urging Benny’s own hand away. “If you got a decent bed, maybe I wouldn’t be forced to use you as a pillow,” Dean says, because fuck if he knows what to say.

Benny shrugs. “I used to sleep four to a bed when I was small.”

“Something’s off,” Dean says. “You’ve been off all day. I don’t -” He shuts up.

“It’s not that, brother,” Benny says. “That ain’t - that ain’t ever going to be it.”

“Then what?” Dean asks. He - god, he shouldn’t have said anything at all.

“I don’t appreciate it when you - when you and Charlie make fun of my very reasonable fears,” Benny says. Snaps, almost.

“If it’s not me drooling all over you that you’re angry about, then --” Dean stops. “Not my fault you make a comfy pillow, buddy.” 

“That’s not-” Benny draws in on himself. Even father from Dean. Shoulders up. 

_Shit_ , Dean thinks. Remembers Benny’s eyes dark on him as Dean flushed and adjusted himself. _Shitshitshit_. Then - “Wait, you’re not angry about the tattoo parlor, are you?” Benny’s shoulders tense around his ears in a way that tells Dean that yes, Benny was worried about exactly that. 

But Benny - there’s no way Benny’s more upset that Dean’s blood runs a little red than that he snores. So -- Dean clenches his fists. “That Charlie and I -- you weren’t going to snap and eat us because of a little blood,” Dean says. “You said reasonable fears, and I call bullshit on that. I’ve seen you handle worse. Give yourself some goddamn credit.”

Benny’s shoulders relax a little, just a little, from around his ears. “The kind of faith you have in me, brother,” he says. There’s something in his voice that Dean would call wonder if he wasn’t, you know, a dude.

“I’m not giving you anything you haven’t earned,” Dean says. Leans against Benny, who doesn’t seem inclined to take the space on his own.

“You trust too easy,” Benny says. Leans into Dean a bit. It’s a hot day, and Dean has the sleeves on his plaid rolled up, so Benny’s heavy coat presses against the bare skin of his forearms.

“Yeah, no,” Dean says. “That is definitely not true. You can ask literally anyone who knows me. Any one of the very small number of people who knows me, because trust and I aren't exactly on good terms.”

Benny snorts a little, dismissively, and Dean - Dean wants to just stay here, still, leaning against Benny, watching the tiger pace before them, but he - the anger that he shoved back in that box, when Benny’s neck knitted itself back together as his soul poured from Sam’s arm, flares back up. It’s not like the other times, when Dean could talk himself down, because they’re standing here and Benny is snorting derisively at him, like Dean’s some petulant child, some wide-eyed ingenue, instead of someone who’s been a vampire, someone who’s literally been to hell, someone who’s fought beside and slept beside Benny for close to two years now.

 _I didn’t have the courage to off myself then,_ Dean remembers Benny saying, hears Sam say _he wasn’t planning on coming back_ , and realizes, distantly, that he is shaking with rage. Benny is looking at him with some confusion, some concern, but hasn’t really moved to protect himself. Dean wants - he wants to grab Benny. He wants to kiss him so deep they crawl inside each other’s skin, and he wants to punch some sense into him, and he wants to kiss him so sharply his lip splits and Benny can see for himself just what kind of control he has. He wants to just wind his fingers around the unbroken skin of Benny’s neck and pull their foreheads together and hold on. Instead, Dean takes a deep, shaky, breath. “You don’t get to keep giving up on yourself like this,” Dean says. Enunciates every word. He can’t remember the last time he felt this angry, the shudder of his ribcage, the vibrations along his arms and fists, the red clouding in at the edge of his vision. 

“Cheri,” Benny says, soft, reaching out, and Dean takes a jerky step backward because he has no idea what he’s going to do if Benny touches him.

He takes another step back, and another, and another, letting the overhanging trees swallow him.

*

Benny finds him, some indeterminate amount of time later. Dean’s sitting in the shadow of a mausoleum, legs stretched on a stone plinth. When the red cleared from Dean’s vision and he found himself wandering a cemetery, at first he thought he’d been walking blindly for ages, but it turns out this damn city has a cemetery right next to the zoo.

The stone is cool through his jeans. He stares up at Benny, partially backlit by the sun. There’s just enough detail in his face for him to see that Benny looks as lost as Dean doesn’t want to admit he feels. They’ve never - even when they met in Purgatory, they circled each other, an easy, biting back and forth, and he doesn’t know what the fuck to say right now. He looks up at Benny and the same thoughts flash through his mind - kiss him, hit him, cut himself open on Benny, wind him in close and tight until they’re sharing breath. It’s the last one that unsettles Dean. Scares him, if he wants to be honest. Not the blood. The desire to just hold on. It feels like - He wants a kind of intimacy he’s not sure he knows how to give in return. Not sure he knows how to accept, even if Benny were stupid enough to want to give it to someone like Dean. 

“Sam told you,” Benny says, finally. Benny shifts, awkward. Settles heavily with his back against the mausoleum door. Of course he found him. Dean’s phone is off, but a vampire gets your scent for life. Dean’s his ride back, after all.

Dean closes his eyes. He’s the one - he’s the one who asked if he could cut off Benny’s head. He doesn’t - he knows he doesn’t get to be angry, but - “You ever think about what that would do to me?” Dean asks. He’s not sure if the pictures dancing behind his eyes are better or worse than Benny’s face. “You ever think about how I’d feel, if you - It would be one thing if you’d died for real and it had been an accident.” He tightens and relaxes his arms. Can feel the tense muscles of his forearm. Hear the air parting around the machete. “If something had come up down there, and the legitimate only way for Sam and Bobby to get back was for you to sacrifice yourself.” Hear flesh and bone part. See them. Opens his eyes so he can Benny, alive, or near enough to it. “But. How the FUCK do you think I’d feel, knowing you’d used me to commit suicide?”

Benny closes his eyes. Looks lost. “You’d have gone on.”

“That’s not the _point_ ,” Dean snarls, and: “I thought I was supposed to the stupid one here, christ.”

Benny’s eyes snap open. “You ain’t-”

“Not the _point_ ,” Dean snarls again. Clenches his hand.

“You asked, Dean,” Benny says. His head is tilted back against the mausoleum door, one leg drawn up and arm draped over it. His voice is - “You asked,” he repeats, and he sounds a little like the stone beneath them, old and cold and worn down.

“Yeah,” Dean says. He’s watching the exposed curve of Benny’s throat. “Yeah, I get it, I killed you, I don’t get to be mad. I don’t get to be pissed that you almost just. Let it stick.” Thinks about how Benny’s neck felt, wrapped in those sheets. Thinks about how his stomach felt as he closed the trunk of his car on Benny’s body. “But I said - I told you I was going to do better by you. You were going to come back. You were supposed to come back.” He feels like if he blinks, Benny’s going to disappear.

Benny exhales, slow. “What would you have done?” he asks. Head tilted back to stare at the sky flicking in and out of existence between the leaves of the trees around them. “If you’d known. If I’d told you.”

Dean breathes. “I don’t know,” he says, admission torn low and guttural out of him. He thinks he smells blood. He smells soil and grass and rock and tries to figure out if Benny’s close enough that Dean can smell him, or if it’s just memory. They’re miles apart. They’re miles apart and Dean could reach out and touch him. “I don’t know,” Dean says, because he’s thought about it, he’s thought about it endlessly, and he still doesn’t know.

Benny closes his eyes. Leaves his face tilted to sky. “I was trying to make it easier on everyone,” he says. “Worse ways to go out than saving the world.”

“Easier?” Dean asks. Growls. His arm spasms. He looks at Benny’s throat. He thinks about how many pounds of force it takes to cut through flesh and bone. He laughs. “Easier. Christ. I can’t stop seeing it,” Dean says. His left hand comes up to work at the phantom tightness in his right forearm again. “You said you should have waited with your family, for Florence to get better. That you should have stayed.”

Dean throws himself upwards and starts stalking back towards the car. He shoves his hands in his pockets. “Maybe try learning from the past,” he says, flat, as Benny keeps pace behind him. He’s glad he can’t see Benny’s face. His phone starts buzzing as soon as he turns it back on. There’s a series of increasingly-concerned messages from Charlie.

“Let’s grab Charlie and go,” Dean says, and Benny follows silent behind him.

They stop at the car, regarding each other across the roof. Benny looks - his face is tight and so very old, and he opens his mouth to say something before Dean waves him sharply off.

Charlie appears to be able to sense the tension from outside the car, maybe from how rigid Dean’s arms are on the steering wheel, or how Dean and Benny aren’t looking at each other or talking, or maybe she’s just had a hell of a day herself, because they’re all silent the whole way back to the Bunker, which Dean makes in two hours instead of two and a half. Christ, he thinks. He’s had less awkward drives with the imprint of dad’s ring fresh on his cheek.

Sam, sitting in the library as they return, takes one look at the stiff, silent way the three of them are moving, closes his book, and just says “Nope,” as he heads for the kitchen. “Nope, whatever this is, I am not dealing with it.”

*

Dean stares at his ceiling that night for what feels like a week or two, but is in fact only hours. He needs - he needs to do something. Fuck or scream or fight, but he keeps feeling the tension in his forearm and seeing Benny’s face tipping upwards toward him. To give his blade clearance. He thinks about drinking. About sweeping everything from his desk in a single, huge crash.

Instead, he throws a flannel shirt over his t-shirt and knocks on Charlie’s door. Knocks soft, in case she’s sleeping. She answers quickly, takes a single look at him and tucks herself up under his chin. He feels himself let go, just a little, into the hug, some of his muscles unwinding as he tucks her head under his chin and lets himself breathe. Eventually, he lets go and scrubs his hand across his face, just a bit. There’s definitely no moisture on his face.

She heads across to his room. Dean drops down on the foot of his bed as she pulls the box of movies out from under his bed. She drops the box beside him and stares at him meaningfully. Dean flops on his back, purposefully obtuse, so he can stare up at the ceiling and his eyes have to stop drifting to Benny’s door without his consent. Charlie pokes his thigh and Dean ignores her. She pokes him harder and he scowls at her because it’s not like Benny can’t hear them moving around. It’s not like he doesn’t know what they’re up to, not like he doesn’t know he’s welcome, and --

Dean scowls again, more at himself this time, and he swings upright and heads across the hall. He stops, waiting. Raises his hand and starts to knock but Benny doesn’t give him the chance, opening the door before Dean’s knuckles can meet the wood. They stand there, regarding each other with a kind of prickly intent and distance that there hasn’t been between them since that first day when Benny saved Dean’s life. Dean silently inclines his head towards his bedroom, where Charlie is putting something into the player. Benny nods, and Dean feels a bit more of the high-strung tension leech from his body.

The title card for Episode I scrolls across the screen as they get settled and Dean wants to groan or argue, but apparently this is what happens when no one is willing to say anything.

*

Dean wakes with soft disorientation to the low black glow of the TV on standby. There’s a disorienting moment where he can’t feel anything other than comfort. The pillow beneath his head is sturdy and just a little cooler than it should be. He’d been dreaming - he’d been dreaming about Hell, about Purgatory, about the different ways humans and vampires bleed from the carotid when you sever a neck, nothing like the cauterizing wound of a lightsaber; a nightmare soothed into something softer and less jagged at some point before he bolted, gasping.

There’s a hand carding through his hair, and it is with the steady acceptance of midnight haze that he realizes he has fallen asleep on Benny again. That his head is in Benny’s lap, and Benny’s hand is carding through his hair. Dean must have made a noise or his heartbeat changed or something, because Benny seems to have noticed he’s half-awake. The pillow, body, under him, freezes a little and the hand withdraws. Dean just - what the hell ever, he’ll deal with it in the morning - he turns his face back into Benny’s thigh, burrowing deeper, angling his head until Benny’s hand returns, a cool weight gentling across the crown of his head, the nape of his neck.

“It was a shitty thing to do,” Benny says, a low, soft drawl, then “I’m here,” loud enough that Dean knows he’s meant to hear it. “I’m glad I’m here,” he says, and Dean drifts back off.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a content warning at the end of this chapter regarding a case; it does contain spoilers, but please check it out if you're at all concerned.

Dean wakes surprisingly well-rested, feeling only the faintest shadows of the dry-eyed, raw-throated hangover he usually has after the kind of dreams he’d started into, the shaky, hollow-chested feeling he always just ignores and crams down into the pile of shit he’ll deal with when he dies or never. They’ve shifted in the night so that Dean’s head is pillowed on Benny’s stomach, and Benny’s slid down the headboard so he’s half propped against it. His eyes are closed, and Dean thinks about what it means that Benny’s slept through his waking.

Dean lets himself stay there, breathing in the clean-sharp sandalwood scent of Benny. The chest underneath him moves steadily and he thinks about camouflage. Benny’s shirt is surprisingly soft beneath Dean’s cheek. Dean’s arm is thrown across Benny’s torso and his fingers dug into the blankets. His pinky finger and the side of his palm brush against Benny’s wrist. Benny’s other hand is a solid weight against Dean’s shoulder. Dean breathes. He doesn’t think he’s ever managed to truly outrun that kind of nightmare before. There’s never been a feeling of safety that derailed them into something - not pleasant, but not literally hell. He has none of the shaky, hollow-chested feeling that follows them, the cracked-open rawness that he ignores and crams into the pile of shit he’ll deal with when he dies or never.

He closes his eyes and pretends to sleep, even though he’s well past the point of being able to drift off again. “Hey,” Dean says, finally. 

The rise and fall of Benny’s chest changes. “Morning, mon cheri,” Benny says, low and thick. His hand on Dean’s shoulder doesn’t move, a steady and constant weight. Dean’s not sure if he wants Benny to move the hand away or along the curve of his neck.

Even for Dean, at this point, he can’t really pretend this isn’t happening. This stupid, touch-starved monkey thing he does. That gives him a night’s sleep that’s a damn sight better than he deserves. He thinks that it would be easier if he and Benny were sleeping together instead of - instead of just _sleeping_ together.

It’s different than it was in Purgatory, when they’d end up huddled up together against the night, in some rat-free cave or back to back beneath the uncertain, swaying canopy of the trees. Automatically, Dean thinks he misses the purity of Purgatory, the way everything about him was stripped down and bared, but - he doesn’t remember the way things smelled in Purgatory, not really. Not the way an individual thing smelled. The entire place was almost as monochrome in smell as it was in color; a flat inhale of rock and pine and decaying leaves and blood. Dean thinks he must have stunk; he thinks that all of them must have stunk; but he realizes suddenly, sharply, that he can’t remember it. He feels weirdly hollow at the thought, wonders how he could have failed to notice something so essential was missing. He breathes a little deeper, almost by instinct, pulling in the still faintly-dusty recycled air of the Bunker, the laundry detergent they all use from Benny’s shirt, the woodsy-clean soap Benny favors, the underlying not-quite-human predator sharpness. He wonders, almost dizzily, what Benny smells like at the nape of his neck, behind the shell of his ear or his elbows and wrists, how the scent of him intensifies where the veins run close to his skin at his neck and inner thighs. Dean clenches his hands involuntarily, only realizing he’s doing it when his hand on the mattress shifts against Benny’s wrist.

“What time is it?” Dean asks, stretching a little to hide the movement, pushing himself up on his hands to look at the clock. At this point, he’s entirely unsurprised to see that it’s well into morning. Benny shifts under him, beneath the cage of his arms, hand running from Dean’s shoulder and down his arm. Dean’s breath catches for a second until he realizes that Benny’s just shifting farther down on the bed and away from the headboard so that his neck’s at a less extreme angle.

“So this is memory foam, then,” Benny says.

“It remembers you,” Dean says, and flops onto his back beside Benny. He interlaces his fingers over his stomach and stares at the ceiling. 

“All good, brother,” Benny says.

“Yeah?” Dean says, exhaling a breath he hadn’t even realized he was holding. He thinks about the other day. About how he’d gotten distracted by anti-possession tattoos and bolted out of bed and Benny hadn’t touched him, like he was watching a line Dean hadn’t even drawn. “Yeah?” Dean asks again.

“Yeah,” Benny says. 

He thinks about Benny, walking silent, too many steps behind him in a graveyard. He thinks about Benny, watching Elizabeth, watching Florence. _You should try taking your own damn advice_ Dean had told him. 

Dean stays.

Benny passes Dean his phone from the bedside table as Dean pats at his pockets. Benny closes his eyes and lies quietly as Dean flicks through the sites for real news (often useless) and tabloids (occasionally useful), shoulders and calves touching.

*

Charlie’s sitting in the library. She’s got her legs kicked up on the table and her laptop balanced on her thighs, tapping absently at the edges of the trackpad, looking pointedly at everything in the room that isn’t her phone, sitting silent and isolated on the polished brown wood.

“Morning, sunshine,” Dean says, tugging gently at her short ponytail.

She tilts her head back to stare at him upside down over the back of her chair and flips him off. “Sleep well?” she asks, voice sugar-sweet.

Right. Even Natalie Portman’s charms probably hadn’t been enough for him falling asleep on Benny to escape her notice. He wonders, for a few panicked seconds, when she left - if he was drifting, tilted against Benny’s shoulder, or -- “Yes, actually,” he says with surprising honesty.

Even with her face upside down, he can see that the way her eyes crease is genuine. “Good,” she says. On the table, her phone buzzes. She ignores it. Dean raises an eyebrow. Her phone slides against the grain. Charlie pulls her head back upright but stares pointedly at her laptop screen until her phone stops.

Okay.

“When’s the last time your car had an oil change?” Dean asks.

*

Charlie brings her phone with her into town. Leaves it in the Impala when they run in to get the right oil and filter for her car. She tries on gas station sunglasses from a dusty spinning rack and poses dramatically at Dean while he sorts through crinkling bags of chips on metal shelves.

She pays for their gas and snacks and two pairs of sunglasses with a stolen credit card. Hers are ludicrously purple and heavily cat-eyed, and he gamely lets her drop a pair of heavy-framed dark lenses on his nose. It’s a bright, cloudless day and the sun is harsh, reflecting off the asphalt and Baby’s gleaming black hood. 

Her phone lights up on the front seat, noise and vibration lost to the spill of highway underneath them. She turns up the radio, sings along to a song neither of them knows as the wind whips in through the open windows. She pokes him in the shoulder and Dean rolls his eyes, waits until she jabs him again to join in.

*

“Never use an adjustable wrench on the drain plug,” Dean says. The concrete below his back is cool, smell of oil and metal and carbon wrapping around him from above.

“Uh-huh,” Charlie mutters. “Lefty-loosey, righty-tighty,” she says, focusing intently on the wrench end as she lines up the rubber hammer. She squeaks a little in success as the drain plug comes loose, adjusts the pan they’ve put down so that the dark oil drains into it.

“Just like that,” Dean says, turning his head to grin at her. Her smile matches his. They could easily push out from under the car, but Dean finds there’s something almost - almost comforting about the way the underside of the car hovers over them, help up securely by jack lifts. The familiar curves and planes, the long driveshaft, the linear arms of the control arm cross braces. He knocks his knuckles fondly against the solid frame of Charlie’s car before he works his way out, shirt riding up where it catches on the concrete of the Bunker’s garage floor.

Charlie scoots out behind him, a much less practiced, flailing motion that he tightens his mouth at so he doesn’t laugh. He grabs a rag from where he sits and uses it to wipe off his hands before he tosses it to her.

“So, you’ve done that before,” he offers blandly as she scrubs between her fingers.

“No,” she says innocently.

Dean raises an eyebrow at her.

“Not in real life, anyway,” she admits.

Dean shakes his head and stands. Offers her a hand and hauls her upright. “You know that you don’t have to put up with my bullshit, right?” he says. “If I’m trying to show you something you already know…”

Charlie rolls her eyes and tosses the dirty rag at his face. “Oh nooooo,” she says. “Spending time with a frieeeeeend. Plus, it was all purely theoretical knowledge.” She catches the rag when Dean throws it back at her and lays it over the hood of her car. “Show me something else I need to know.”

“Okay,” Dean says. Points at a Ford Fairlane Crown Vic in the long rows of vehicles waiting for the Men of Letters who never left the Bunker. “Let’s jump in the deep end.”

“You don’t seriously think that’s going to start?” Charlie asks.

“I know it won’t,” Dean says. The cars are relatively free of dust, considering how long they’ve been hibernating, but there’s a world of difference between ‘not falling apart’ and ‘running just fine.’ “But we’re going to figure out why that is.”

“Huh,” Charlie says. “I’ve always kind of wanted to debug a physical thing.”

*

“Do you remember Famine?” Dean asks. Sam raises his head to look at him. They’re on their way back from a Rawhead in Little Rock, oncoming headlights filling the Impala with waves of light that rise and fall as other vehicles near and then pass without any interaction other than the exchange of headlights. Dean thought about asking Sam if he wanted to take the 7 or another byway through the Ozarks, but it’s already the better part of a day’s drive through to Lebanon, and Sam looks like he’s missing his shitty, shitty, bed, so Dean put them on the 40 without comment, flat scrubby forest and distance hiding the fact that they’re threading between the Ouachita and Ozark National Forests.

Charlie and Benny are on a salt and burn in Grand Island. _Nebraska lied_ , Charlie had texted him. _This is not grand - which I guess is a matter of perspective - but it’s not even an ISLAND._ Later, a picture of Benny, leaning against the railing of a dark wood walkway over marshland and watching a murmuration of birds. Benny sent him a text mocking the city’s 1890s historic village, and later a photo of a twisted piece of metal trying to pass as wall art in the motel. It looked a little like a cabbage trying to fuck a butterfly. The picture also captured Benny’s reflection in the purple chrome and Dean felt warmth in his stomach. 

“Famine,” Dean repeats. To the south, the scrubs fall away to farmland. To the north, thick stands of distant pines creep towards the highway.

“What, like the Horseman?” Sam asks. He’s slouching his too-long body, legs akimbo and elbow propped on the edge of the window.

“No, Sammy, like the Irish Potato Famine,” Dean says. Rolls his eyes. “Yes. Famine. The Horseman.”

Sam’s hand comes up automatically, touching lightly at the skin of his jaw, the corner of his mouth, like he’s checking to see if the skin is wet with blood. In the headlights of the cars merging at the interchange, Dean can see him swallow.

“That’s not what I--” Dean says. Exhales. “People were literally eating each other alive, Cas was chowing down on raw hamburger, and you were -” he stops. Drums his fingers on the wheel. “But I was fine.”

“Yeah,” Sam says, slow and cautious. Not like he’s forgotten, but like it’s blurred into all the other shit, sometimes. Or like he’s just confused about why Dean’s bringing it up.

“Do you think he was right?” Dean asks. “About me.”

Sam shakes his head. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I don’t remember. I was kinda hopped up on demon blood at the time.”

Dean relaxes his hands on the steering wheel. “Never mind.”

“You do, though,” Sam says. “You remember.”

Dean shrugs. Changes lanes to pass a sedan, kid in the backseat watching them with her face pressed to the window. 

“What was it, Dean?”

Dean ignores him. Stares at the road falling away beneath them.

“Dean,” Sam says. Soft.

 _You’re allowed to want things_ , Sam had told Dean after Provo, but that’s not really true. Dean has spent most of his life training himself out of wanting things. Food, when Dad was days past due and what they had was only going to stretch so far. Sleep, when things came crawling after them. Friends. A home. A feeling of safety. They’re not the kinds of things a person is supposed to be able to talk themselves out of wanting. Hierarchies of needs and all that shit. He wonders, sometimes, if Famine was right, and inside he’s just a deep, dark nothing.

Dean rolls his shoulder. “He said that the reason I wasn’t hungry was that I was already dead inside.” 

Sam laughs, loud. 

Dean jerks his head towards him, surprised. “What,” he says.

Sam laughs again. “I’m sorry, were you expecting some kind of deep, dramatic condemnation from me? Trauma fucks you up in all kinds of ways, but no one who enjoys a cheeseburger and a bad movie as much as you do could possibly be dead inside.”

“Thanks, bitch,” Dean snaps. His teeth feel sharp in his mouth, but Sam laughs again, warm, and Dean feels something uncoil in his spine, just a little.

*

The Fairlane becomes a project over the next while, something Dean and Charlie poke at between hunts. They swap a long-dead battery for one with some life in it. Drain gas long-since gone bad and replace it and the filters it gunked with new ones. They work methodically through the things you’d expect to be wrong with a car that won’t start that worked yesterday, then through the stuff that goes wrong when you leave a thing lifeless for half a century.

Charlie’s hand slips off the wrench and she swears as her knuckles slam into the engine.

“Careful,” Dean says, but his hand is hovering between the back of her head in the hood in case she’d automatically pulled up in pain.

“You okay?” Kevin asks, and Dean smacks his own head into the hood, spinning to see where the voice is coming from.

“I’m fine,” Charlie says, hissing and shaking her hand. Reaches out her other one to check Dean’s head.

“You should both be more careful,” Kevin says. He’s sitting cross-legged on the hood of the nearby Hudson, eating jellybeans out of a bag. 

“How long have you _been_ there?” Dean asks. Scrubs at his hair and hisses a little, but he’ll be fine.

“Though you were working on translating that demigod thing,” Charlie says. 

“More importantly,” Dean says. “Is that an entire bag of black jellybeans?”

Charlie narrows her eyes. “Yet more importantly, what did you do with the rest of them?”

Kevin shrugs. “Benny and Sam won’t stop yelling and I got bored.” He tosses a black jellybean into the air, leaning back to catch it in his mouth. He misses, and it bounces off the side of his cheek and skitters across the hood. “The other flavors are gross. I put them in the garbage where they belong.”

Charlie opens her mouth. Closes it. “You didn’t even put them aside for someone else?”

“No one else even likes jellybeans,” Kevin says. 

“I eat them,” Dean says, and, casually, like it’s not freaking him out: “What were they yelling about?”

“You eat them. You don’t _like_ them,” Kevin says. Tosses another once and catches it successfully, pumping his fist as he swallows.

“The argument?” Dean asks, totally cool, totally chill.

Kevin shrugs. “It started out being about the number of holly berries needed, and devolved into declensions and aspects or something.”

“Okay,” Dean says. “Awesome.” Wipes at the grease on his hands with a cloth. From all appearances, Benny and Sam are good with each other. Chill. “Okay,” he says again, turning back to the car. Bracing his hands on the open hood. “Okay, so, Charlie, the next thing we do is--”

Charlie leans back against the front bumper and crosses her arms. “So,” she says.

“It’s probably a good thing they’re arguing, actually,” Dean says.

“Uh-huh,” Charlie says.

“Really.” Dean looks at the engine. “They’re both stubborn as mules. Means they’re comfortable enough to mix it up.”

“Go,” Charlie says, nodding towards the door. “I got this.”

“I’m going to go and get a drink of water or something,” Dean says, and casually - so casually - wanders off to the kitchen. Definitely towards the general direction of the kitchen.

“They’re in the library,” Kevin calls out, and Dean hears another jellybean go skittering across the hood of the Hudson.

“Those better be cleaned up by the time I get back,” Dean yells.

“You do know that they _sell_ bags of just black jellybeans,” Charlie says as her voice fades out.

*

Sound carries well in parts of the Bunker. It’s annoying sometimes, when you’re trying to sleep. It’s useful in others, like when some ghost/demon/whatever decides they’re going to move in and clear out all their new hunter roommates.

Dean’s pretty sure it’s reassuring he can’t hear any yelling coming from the library. Not when he’s heading up the stairs, not when he’s in the arcing hallway that runs along the war room. Low voices as the hall skirts the wide-open expanse of the library, and Dean’s heart rate definitely doesn’t even out when he sees them.

Benny’s leaning against the table where Sam has his feet kicked up. Sam’s shaking his head and laughing, one hand over his eyes. “Seriously?” he asks.

“Serious as a dirge,” Benny says. 

“Wait,” Sam says. “How did he translate--”

Dean eases back, eases away, feeling ludicrous. Glad neither of them saw him. He heads to the kitchen for real. Grabs a glass and turns on the tap, letting the water rush over his fingers, testing, as he waits for it to cool. He realizes suddenly that he’s been staring blankly at the wall for - he’s not sure, but it’s long enough that the skin on his fingers is ice cold. He fills the glass, drinks. Refills it and turns the tap off, turning to rest his hips against the counter by the fridge. 

“Hey, chief,” Benny says, hovering in the doorway for a moment before steps into the kitchen. 

“Hey,” Dean says. Waves the glass. “Just came up for a drink,” he lies blatantly, because Benny has supernatural hearing and Dean had to walk past the kitchen to get to the library.

“Sure, brother,” Benny says. Opens the door of the fridge and leans in, shoulder almost brushing against Dean as he grabs a bottle from the fridge. Dean puts his glass down on the counter and takes the bottle form Benny, using his ring to pop the top of Benny’s weird, gross old-timey soda. This one is birch beer, but there are bottles of burdock root and dandelion soda in there too.

Dean hands the bottle back to him, flicks the lid at the garbage and pumps his arms when it lands. “I can’t believe you drink that shit,” Dean says, lip curling.

Benny laughs. Tilts the long neck back to drink. “I swear, this offends you more than the blood-drinking.”

Dean rolls his shoulders. “I mean, yeah,” he says. “You need the blood. There’s no excuse for this.”

Benny shakes his head, lets his accent go fancy and broadly southern belle. “Why, you youths and your overly sweetened, chemical sodas.”

Dean snorts. “‘Overly chemical?’ Dude, you literally used to drink _cocaine cola._ ”

“Ah,” Benny says, pointing his bottle at Dean. “But it was _all-natural_ cocaine.”

“Christ,” Dean says. “You and Sam, I swear to God.” 

Benny tilts his bottle back. Dean can see his throat work below the neatly-trimmed edge of his beard. He picks his glass of water back up.

Benny drinks again. Rolls the bottle between the palms of his hands. “Me and Sam, we’re good,” he says, finally.

“Yeah, I know that,” Dean says. Feels the cool, slick surface of the glass against his fingertips. Looks at the grease under his nails. Feels the sharp cut of the edge of a set of cuffs around his wrist when he woke up alone and chained to a radiator in the sweltering Louisiana air. “Kevin said the two of you were really getting into it, but you looked pretty cozy.”

Benny’s mouth twists in a wry smile. “Just arguing about the inherent plasticity of language.”

Dean raises an eyebrow. “So it’s an argument you lost.”

“Nah,” Benny says. “Just turns out we were talking the same language, but a different language, you know?”

“Yeah,” Dean says, “Totally,” then: “No, that makes no sense at all. Not unless it’s about how you insist on calling Pepsi Brad’s Drink, because that’s what they called it ~back in the day.~”

“That’s pretty close, actually,” Benny says. He scratches a finger against the glass bottle like he’s trying to pick at a label that’s not there, logo etched into the amber glass. “I knew some Latin from my grand-maman, from her spells, from her books. Picked up a lot of it from the Old Man, though.”

Dean nods. Benny doesn’t talk about them much. His nest. Dean gets it - he doesn’t talk much about Hell, either. Somethings you do, you just want to forget. Dean doesn’t know if the Old Man had a name, if never using it helps Benny to distance himself from everything. If Benny’s maker was so old he’d forgotten who he used to be, or if it was an affectation.

Benny taps at his bottle. “He used to slip into Latin sometimes. Sometimes he’d give us a book or try to teach us, but a lot of the time he’d just lapse into it and let us figure it out. We used to sing, sometimes, before we took a ship. Something between a shanty and a dithyramb, these wild chorals dedicated to Dionysis, to the God of drink.” Benny laughs a little. “Turns out he was speaking Vulgar Latin, not Classical. The airs that man put on. I don’t know what the point of it was, we were already well in his thrall.”

Dean shrugs. “Some people just need a reason to feel like they’re better than everyone else,” he says. He’s been all over the place, met all kinds of people. Knows what it feels like to have a gaping hole inside looking for anything to fill it. Dean’s tried filling it with booze, with violence. Tried letting it sit empty. He feels like he’s working on something else now, but the edges of it are hard to define.

Some people fill that hole with thinking they’re better than everyone.

“That, uh -” Dean swallows around something heavy in his throat. “That why you whistle, you hum when you fight?”

“We had a piano,” Benny says. “On our farm. Me and Gertrude. Was more than we could afford, but we got it anyway.”

Dean wonders - he wonders if Benny and his family used to sit around it sometimes, on long winter nights or when the mood struck, used to sit around it and play and sing.

“I loved music long before I met my maker,” Benny says. “Ain’t no way I was going to let him take that from me, too.”

“The Old Man can suck it,” Dean says, holding out his glass for Benny to clink his bottle against.

“Now, that’s something I’ll drink to,” Benny says.

*

Dean feels - not fragile or anything, but a little off, maybe, when he gets back to the garage. Kevin has disappeared who knows where, and Charlie is back under the hood of the car.

Charlie swears loudly and inventively and in a variety of languages, including Klingon and Dothraki and - “Wait, was that Elvish?” Dean asks. “Did Tolkein even make up swears?” 

Charlie pops out from beneath the hood. Wipes her hands on the rag. “Leaving aside the fact that you know Elvish well enough to know when I’m making it up - are you claiming you don’t know how to swear in Latin?” Charlie asks.

Dean shrugs, because dude, of course he does. 

There’s something satisfying about having oil and dirt worn into the cracks of his hands, dark grease lining his nail beds instead of blood. He thinks about Benny’s blood under his fingernails in that alleyway. The dark cast of it in the forest while he waited, tense, for Sam to come through that portal with two souls roiling under his skin, Benny’s body in the trunk of the car. He thinks about driving the I40 with Sam - Sam, who didn’t know what it was like to not eat for days, let alone a year - Sam’s fingers to his own mouth as if checking for blood and laughing at the idea that Dean could be dead inside.

In Purgatory, dirt and blood looked almost the same, the purity of the place even narrowing the colors of the place to grays and silvers and flat whites, sepias bleeding to blue-blacks the only sign of changing seasons. 

_There was something pure about being there_ Dean had said. Thinking about how it pared everything back to the most simple, primal urge to hunt. That it stripped away uncertainties and hard questions, left nothing but single-minded purpose. 

Dean thinks now about how he didn’t even notice that the smell of the place itself was all-consuming, that he couldn’t smell himself or Benny or Cas and it seemed normal. He thinks about his face turned into Benny’s chest in sleep, breathing him in. The sunrise he’d seen that first morning back on Earth had startled him with its intensity, and he’d had a brief, wild, instinctive fear the colors were going to burn him.

“Pass me the ratchet,” Charlie says and he does so on autopilot.

Sparse, Dean thinks suddenly. Not pure. Purgatory. Thinks: sparse, spare, dilute, diminished. Thinks _consumed_. He thinks about yellow-eyed demons and John’s single-minded purpose, the singular purpose that drove his and Sam’s entire childhood as Dean tried frantically to jam the pieces of their lives together into a shape that fit their father’s design, until Sam walked out and everything fell apart. He thinks about John cutting his way through monsters and demons and looking for yellow-eyed. He thinks about the swath he’d cut through Purgatory, looking for Cas.

He thinks about the fact that even with Benny’s soul curled up in his arm, Dean hadn’t known for sure his eyes were blue until Benny was standing next to him in the cool night air, sky properly black and full of stars, dew on his shirt and green grass crushed beneath his feet as they pulled each other into a tight hug.

“You should call Parisa,” Dean says, faintly, because he’s standing there blankly and Charlie is looking at him with concern. 

“You okay?” Charlie asks, cautiously. She wipes her hands and moves carefully towards him.

“Or don’t,” he says. “I don’t know what you and her are like.” Shakes his head. “Tell her you’re a bounty hunter or something, and you can deal with the rest later.” Charlie reaches out and catches his hands. “Hell, I don’t know. But you can - you’re allowed to want things,” Dean says. He feels almost light-headed. Purgatory. That type of purity, that kind of an obsession, is a crutch and Charlie is better than that.

Charlie squeezes his hands. “Okay,” she says. She smiles, watery. Carefully, slowly, like she doesn’t want to spook him, she wraps her arms around him and pulls him in. It’s not a quick thump and release or a breezing greet, but a deep, solid hug that keeps going even as his lungs catch against it and his arms sneak around her too.

Dean thinks about that hole in the middle of him. He thinks - he thinks that maybe, maybe, he can be better than that, too. That there are colors and scents and feelings and things he’s allowed to have. That he doesn’t have to be the scraped-raw, pared down to the bones _thing_ of single intent he was in Purgatory, that he’s spent most of his life being.

Dean tries on something new.

He tries on wanting.

He tries on letting himself want.

*

It’s awkward at first, uncomfortable. Sends weird waves of guilt through him.

“What the fuck,” Sam asks. He’s standing in Dean’s doorway, and has clearly discovered the black velvet painting that Dean and Kevin had hung in his room while Sam was out picking up supplies. “Dogs playing poker?”

“What can I say,” Dean says. Shrugs. “I’m a fan of the classics.”

“Dogs. Playing poker,” Sam repeats, bewildered, as Kevin appears behind Sam, shooting Dean a dirty look that he missed some of this.

“Cla-ssic,” Dean repeats, slow and pointed, drawing out the word.

Charlie and Benny are serious and stony-faced as they watch someone in a rubber suit stomp on an intricately-built scale model of a city. Benny’s mouth is twisted wryly and he’s obviously biting his lip to keep quiet. Charlie’s eyebrows keep trying to sneak up her forehead. Dean stares very seriously at Sam. “Classic,” he says again. Kevin, one hand slapped across his mouth, breaks and starts laughing.

Sam spins at the sound and actually appears to take in the room for the first time. Dean and Benny propped sitting against the headboard, Dean’s legs pulled up so Charlie can use them as a backrest, some poor set designer’s weeks and months of hard work disappearing under a rubber foot.

“Wait, are you having a movie night?” Sam asks.

Dean gestures vaguely around the room and tries not to dwell on why it feels so weird that Sam’s noticing this now, after months.

“Oh,” Sam says. He awkwardly reaches for Dean’s desk chair, swatting automatically as Charlie throws a skittle at his head.

“Taste the rainbow,” she says. Rolls her eyes when Sam looks at her in confusion. “Tonight’s movie night is queers only.”

“Cool,” Kevin says, shrugging and settling down at the foot of Dean’s bed. Dean blinks. Benny digs around and tosses Kevin a package of licorice because Prophets (or kids these days, or just Kevins) are fucking weird.

Sam coughs. “Right,” he says. He looks like he’s ready to leave when he notices the frame wedged against the side of Dean’s desk. He tilts it back to look and yelps as he backpedals automatically. “The fuck, Dean.”

Dean laughs, and it feels surprisingly bright in his chest. He doesn’t actually blame Sam too much, because the next velvet painting scheduled to go up in Sam’s room is a hobo clown crying in distress that even Dean thinks is a little disturbing.

Sam flips him off as he heads for the door.

“Pretend like you actually live here,” he calls after Sam. “Get a throw rug or something and we won’t have to decorate your room for you.”

Benny starts laughing as soon as Sam is out of the room, and Dean can feel the vibrations of it in his chest.

*

Sam gets a rug.

*

Sam also - as Dean finds out later - orders a whole bunch of mattresses, which Dean discovers when he and Charlie run the Fairlane into town for the mail and to see how it hangs together on the road. Charlie drives, those same violently purple cats-eye sunglasses crammed defiantly atop her head even though it’s gray out. She seems a little nervous until they get up to speed, like she’s waiting for the engine to catch fire or the frame to shake apart around her. She grins at him a little wildly, and he holds out a hand which she high-fives around blindly.

He thinks about telling her that yes, the car will break down again eventually, because they always do, but they’ll be able to put her back together. Instead, Dean lets himself sprawl along the bench seat, arms wide against the black leather, and lets himself enjoy the roiling clouds and the joy on her face.

Charlie literally bounces out of the car when they pull up to the curb by the post office. “We brought it back to life!” she says, wrapping Dean up in an excited hug before she pulls back and smoothes her shirt. “I mean, we got it running again,” she says, face held more seriously.

Dean gives her a friendly noogie and hugs her. “No,” he says. “It’s cool. It’s really freaking cool. You’re allowed to be excited.”

She laughs and rests her hand on the hood. The red paint is a little faded, but whatever magic kept the rest of the Bunker from falling inches deep into dust and cobwebs and half a century of mouse poop held back body rust and flaking paint. Dean insisted on replacing the tires because even if the Fairlane and the rest in the expansive garage were somehow not riding the ground on white-walled flats, he didn’t want to fuck around with multiple blowouts.

“You’re thinking about Parisa’s reaction if you roll up in this with your hair in victory curls, aren’t you?” he asks.

Charlie smacks his arm. “Maybe a little,” she relents, and tucks under his arm as they head into the post office.

“Yo, Hector,” Dean says, smiling broadly at the man working behind the desk.

“Morning, Dean,” Hector says. There’s no one else in the small post office, but it feels weirdly crowded in here, a series of large white boxes crammed in the normally empty spot between Hector’s station at the back room.

“Mabel get a bit shop-happy again?” Dean asks conspiratorially, nodding towards the boxes.

Hector laughs. “No, man, those are yours.”

Dean opens his mouth and raises a finger. Charlie braces her arms on the counter and hops forward off her feet to get a better look. “Huh,” she says, and that is how Dean finds out that as well as a rug, Sam also ordered a small army of boxed mattresses.

Hector (and the other people who work at the post office) have dealt without blinking with a lot of weird-ass stuff that Dean and Sam have had mailed here - bubble mailers full of shifting powders that smell of cinnamon and moss and lightning, rattling boxes of bones, weapons and masks with parcels covered entirely with warning labels, the too-discretely labeled and wrapped parcels Dean always makes sure to pick up himself - but there’s apparently something about a stack of seven (seven) mattresses that arouses even Hector’s interest. He watches with keen eyes as Dean and Charlie wrestle box after box down to the car.

 _Jody needed help with research, huh._ Dean texts Sam, along with a picture of his extended middle finger, because Sam clearly arranged this to coincide with the delivery of - Dean hoists a box and does some math - a literal third of a ton of mattresses. This is probably revenge for the fact that someone (Dean) put the clown painting up in Sam’s room one night while he was sleeping so that he woke up to it staring at him.

It becomes clear pretty early that despite the fact that the mattresses are squished impossibly small (Dean’s reasonably certain that they’re going to end up finding out that these mattresses are either completely shit or packed with magic) that seven of them aren’t going to fit in the Fairlane.

Charlie pokes at the ones in the back seat like that’s somehow going to make them take up less space. Dean, standing on the sidewalk in a small forest of upright mattress boxes, sweating because it turns out that cramming a mattress into a tiny little box doesn’t actually make it weigh any less, calls Benny.

“Hey,” he says when Benny picks up on the first ring. “We need a hand in town.”

Benny lets out a soft huff of air. “Car trouble?” he asks.

“Nah,” Dean says. “Sam ordered a bunch of stuff, and it won’t all fit in the car.”

Benny laughs. “Told you you’d end up regretting that clown stunt.”

“I regret nothing,” Dean says.

Charlie, leaning over the back of the front seat to shift the top box so they can see out the rear window, scowls at him.

“Grab Baby and meet us at the post office,” Dean says. Out of the corner of his eye, he thinks he sees Charlie snap her head towards him, but when he looks back over she’s triumphantly slotting the box farther down with a distracted look on her face.

“Keys are in the ignition,” Dean says, because Benny hasn’t replied.

“You sure, brother?” Benny asks.

Dean snorts. “That’s where I always leave them when I park her inside. Never know when you’re going to need a quick getaway.”

“All right,” Benny says, and Dean wonders if there’s a bad connection because his voice sounds a little thick. “Be there soon.”

*

Between both vehicles, they get all the mattresses home. Each box is an awkward hundred pounds, because memory foam mattresses are heavier to start out with. Charlie and Kevin navigate the spiral stairs together with a box while Dean carries one and Benny just kind of hoists a box up on each shoulder and goes for it. If Dean almost misses a step on the metal stairs it’s just because his box is awkward and nothing to do with whether he was watching Benny easily carry two. It only takes them two trips to the garage to get them all into the living quarters, and Dean drops the mattress he’s carrying in Sam’s room. He leaves it there, unopened, but smacks the top of it and feels - warm or something, whatever - that Sam ordered mattresses for everyone, even if it was just some kind of plan to punish him for the clown thing.

Charlie and Kevin disappear into his room with a mattress box to unload it. Dean wanders back down the hall towards his room, passing three boxes grouped where the hallway branches. Another one is set outside of Charlie’s room. Benny’s door is open and he’s wrestling his old mattress from the bed frame. Dean steps in, giving him a hand hauling it up and to the side, because as strong as Benny is, a mattress - especially an old, worn one - is a floppy, ungainly thing.

Benny casually produces a butterfly knife from somewhere on his body and flicks it open with a confident and practiced metallic rush that Dean thinks he can almost feel. He cuts the box open and they both stare suspiciously at the crumpled, shriveled-up thing inside.

Benny snorts. “No offense to your brother, but --”

“There’s no way that’s going to be comfortable,” Dean says.

“I’m not burning the old one just yet,” Benny says. “All I’m saying.”

Dean shrugs. “Might as well see,” he says.

Benny cuts through layers of plastic one at a time until there’s only one left, and he and Dean unfold and unroll the theoretical mattress and shove it into place before Benny slices the last layer of plastic open, and the damn thing just blooms before them.

“I’ll be damned,” Dean says. Purses his lips. “Damned again, I mean.”

Benny pokes at the mattress suspiciously, presses harder at the foam with the palm of his hand, watching it give and rebound. Dean takes the easy road and flops backward onto it. “Huh,” he says, staring up at Benny’s ceiling until Benny himself comes into view, sideways face and quirked eyebrow hovering between him and the ceiling.

“Well?” Benny asks. “What do you think?” He’s looking at Dean a little funny, or maybe it’s because his face is sideways. Dean’s not exactly sure why, because he made sure to keep his boots off the edge.

“We’re telling Sam we never once doubted him,” Dean says. Pats the mattress beside him because it’s Benny’s damn bed, and he gets to make the final call.

Benny settles on the other side of the mattress a little gingerly, like he’s afraid that the mattress will crumple again under his frame, which is kind of ludicrous because Dean’s six feet tall and not exactly a wilting daisy.

“Plenty solid,” Dean says, wiggling around a bit to demonstrate.

“So I see,” Benny says, turning his head on the bare mattress towards Dean, eyes flickering. Dean thinks that he’d be able to feel Benny’s warmth at this distance, if he were human. Dean blinks. Benny’s eyes are such a clear, vivid blue that Dean’s not sure how he missed it, even through the chiaroscuro of Purgatory. He breathes, and --

“Is anyone going to give us a hand?” Kevin yells from down the hall.

Dean laughs a little, as he pulls himself upright, and he’s not even sure why. “I think there might be a spare hand in one of the boxes in the stacks, if you really want,” he yells. Offers one of his own to Benny to pull him to his feet.

The feel of Benny’s hand on his lingers, even as they’re hauling the old mattress to an unused, dusty room at the end of the hall.

*

“Does Charlie know we’re doing this?” Benny asks.

“Yep,” Dean says breezily, popping off the cover on the steering column.

“Uh-huh,” Benny says. “Does she know we’re doing this on her car, in particular?”

“She’ll never know,” Dean says, because he’s reasonably certain Benny’s paid enough attention to his heartbeat to know when he’s lying. It makes Dean feel - he’s not sure. He uses the steering wheel to lever himself upright and out of the car. “As long as you don’t fuck it up,” he says, thwacking the screwdriver to Benny’s chest for him to grab before Dean swings around the car and into the passenger side. There’s an underlying thread of unease, that someone might know him that well. “That plastic Barbie thing Sam keeps around is too new for this to work. You need something made before the mid-nineties.” Under the unease, there’s a trickling warmth at the idea that he’s the focus of that kind of attention, of focus.

Benny laughs. “Any reason we’re not using your Baby, then?”

“You shut your mouth,” Dean says. “She’ll hear you.” Scowls. “He didn’t mean it, Baby,” he calls across the garage as he reaches across the driver’s seat to drag Benny in through the open door.

Benny comes easily, settling into the seat Dean’s already pushed back so smoothly that Dean could almost forget how immovable he can be when he wants. Benny tilts sideways towards Dean so that he can see the mess of exposed wires. “Looks what we need here is a fork and a nice Bolognese sauce,” he says.

Dean rolls his eyes. “It’s not that complicated once you know what you’re looking at.”

Benny snorts. “Well, right now, it looks like I’m dealing with a mating ball of garter snakes.”

“You want the bundle with the starter wire,” Dean says. “Leads right up the steering column.”

“Right,” Benny says, drawl pulling the syllable out. He reaches out hesitantly.

“No,” Dean says. Benny’s hands change trajectory. “No,” Dean says again, and “budge up,” shoving at Benny’s shoulder to push him upright.

“Here, I’ll show you,” Dean says. He half-sprawls across the front seat so he’s in close enough to the steering column. His shoulder on the front seat thumps against Benny’s thigh but he has to leave it there so he can use both of his hands. “Lights and stuff,” he says, pulling out the bundle and tracing it back along the column so Benny can see where it goes. Benny leans sideways so he can see, bracing his right arm against the seat in front of Dean’s stomach, which flutters a bit like he’s some kind of teenage girl or some shit. “Wipers,” Dean says, tracing his fingers along that bundle. Feels the pressure of Benny’s thigh against his shoulder, his braced forearm on the bench seat. It would be easy for Dean to let his head rest on Benny’s leg. Even easier than holding his head up at this angle, maybe. He holds his neck still. “Starter bundle,” Dean says. Over the normal rubber floor mat-dust-gas smell of the car and garage, he can smell the laundry detergent they all use, Benny’s soap beneath it. Charlie’s wires are already stripped. Dean keeps his breath slow and easy as he shows Benny the rest, how to twist and spark the right wires. When Dean pushes himself back upright, Benny is slow to move, so his braced arm ends up sliding up Dean’s ribs as he sits up, then across the back of his shoulder before it retreats with what Dean almost likes to think is reluctance.

“Okay,” Dean says, throat feeling thick. The air feels heavy, even though they have both the front doors open. It must be darker in here than Dean realizes, because Benny’s pupils are blown wide. “Your turn,” Dean says. They are, for some reason, close enough that Dean can see Benny’s throat work as he swallows.

“Easy peasy,” Benny says. He shifts so that he can see the wires on the column, then slides on his side to the bench seat so that he can see the connections better. His feet slide out the door so he doesn’t quite lean into Dean’s thigh, but Dean has a clear view of the curled nape of Benny’s neck. Dean’s hand itches to reach out and rest there, against the knobs of Benny’s spine, brush against the short hairs at the base of his skull. Dean tightens his hands to keep them still. Benny’s fingers on the wires are quick and sure after having seen Dean do it. It feels like no time at all before the engine is roaring to life. Benny puffs up a bit in pride, flipping over to smile broadly up at Dean, his head coming to rest on Dean’s knee for what’s probably a shorter time than it feels like before Benny sits up, breaking the contact.

Dean lets out a breath he doesn’t realize he was holding. The air feels warmer than it should. “And on the first time,” he says. “Took me three,” he says. Doesn’t mention he was seven years old.

“What can I say,” Benny says, and his voice is low. “I had a mighty fine teacher.”

Dean doesn’t blush or anything like that, but his cheeks might flush a little. On account of the heat. “You know what to do with older cars,” he says. He’s speaking quietly for some reason.

Benny nods. Picks up the screwdriver from the floor mat, body passing close to Dean’s as he leans over. Benny waggles the screwdriver. Dean mimes jamming it into the ignition.

“What are you doing to yourself, cheri?” Benny asks. He places the screwdriver carefully between them and catches Dean’s hands with his, slowly enough that Dean has time to pull back if he wants to.

Dean looks down at his hands and realizes that he still has them clenched in fists to stop himself from reaching out and touching. He relaxes them deliberately. They weren’t clutched that tightly or anything, but he indulges. Benny looks up at Dean’s face, raises one eyebrow in question until Dean nods. Benny starts to work carefully at the muscles in Dean’s hands. He starts with Dean’s left hand, thumbs digging steady and strong into the palm of his hand, working into the webbing between Dean’s thumb and forefinger on just the right side of painful. Benny lets out a satisfied noise for no particular reason Dean can identify and releases his left hand, which Dean flexes easily, rolling his wrist and flexing his fingers in amazement as Benny catches Dean’s right hand.

Dean’s surprised to find that his right hand is more tense than the left. Benny’s thumbs dig into the skin, pressure closer to painful as he works his way around Dean’s lifeline, the base of his thumb, the heel of his palm. Benny stops and Dean tries not to whine, because it doesn’t feel done like his other hand, does, but -- Benny just undoes the button at the cuff of Dean’s plaid, carefully rolls the sleeve up to Dean’s elbow after Dean nods at him. Benny works his way up the corded muscles of Dean’s forearm, finding and releasing knots along the back of it, then gently turning Dean’s wrist so Benny can dig his thumbs into the muscles into the softer skin of the inside of Dean’s arm, working from the vulnerable crook of his elbow down to the wrist, through the small healed scars of a lifetime of drawing his own blood with silver. Dean makes an embarrassing noise at the back of his throat as a tension in his arm he hadn’t even realized he was carrying releases. Dean thinks of the broken bones of his arm knitting back together under Cas’s hand, of Benny’s upturned face and the tension in Dean’s arm as he swung. Benny works at the tense muscles of Dean’s forearm, and it isn’t until the last firm rub of Benny’s hand that Dean realizes he’s been carrying that tension _constantly_. That it feels like this is the first time since the crypt, since that alley, that it’s released, and Dean feels almost lightheaded with it, with the release of a low level of tension he didn’t even realize he’d been carrying until it finally lifted.

“Thank you,” Dean says, and his voice is low, throaty.

“Any time,” Benny says, and he’s still got his hands on Dean, only they’ve drifted down so that Dean’s hand is caught between his, and it’s almost like they’re holding hands in the shadowed light and thick, warm air, windshield and solid thrum of the engine cozy around them. Benny’s face is close to Dean’s, so close. He’s looking at his thumb rub across Dean’s knuckles. Dean has a wild moment where he thinks Benny’s going to raise Dean’s hand to his mouth, lay a kiss across his knuckles. When Benny looks up his pupils are blown wide and he looks like he’s holding his breath.

Dean inhales, and it’s like the intake of air pulls Benny in closer. Dean’s hand tightens around Benny’s, and then --

And then Charlie’s voice echoes through the garage, through the open doors of the car, calling their names.

Dean turns his head towards the call and it’s like a spell has been broken and the rest of the world comes crashing back in. He can smell exhaust fumes and motor oil, and Benny slowly draws back, fingers reluctantly disentangling from Dean’s when Dean makes himself release him. Dean breathes deeply, centering himself. He still feels light from the release of the tension in his arm, but he feels unmoored, off-kilter.

“Over here!” he yells, guiding Charlie towards them as Benny ducks down to pull the wires apart.

“Okay,” Charlie says, surveying the scene before her. “We’re going to talk about all of this later,” she says, waving her hand broadly and Dean’s not sure if she means the flush on his cheeks or his single rolled sleeve or the fact that Benny is still putting the steering column of her car back together. Her face is troubled, and Dean feels his heart kick into gear for a completely different reason. “One of Parisa’s friends is missing,” she says.

*

Parisa’s apartment is in a walkup, old enough that the exterior is brick and the faint smell of cigarette smoke from years before lingers in the halls. Charlie hugs Parisa as soon as Parisa opens the door, a long embrace in the doorway that leaves Dean and Benny standing in the hallway and staring at the worn carpet.

“Any word?” Charlie asks, raising her hands to cup Parisa’s face and kiss her when Parisa shakes her head.

Parisa kisses her back, then drops her forehead against Charlie’s, eyes closed for a minute before she takes a deep breath and visibly puts herself back together. “Come in,” she says. There’s a slight twang to her voice, which surprises Dean a little, because he was expecting her words to have the neutral shape of a Midwestern accent.

The apartment is a cramped one-bedroom, living room dominated by the couch she directs Benny and Dean to. It’s that couch that every family ever has owned - tan and brown velour, festooned with darker red-brown flowers and branches. The kind you get second-hand from a family friend or at a second-hand store or for free online. The desk holds a computer, a milk crate full of hardcover books about bugs, and a half-marked stack of undergrad papers. Woven baskets have been hung on the walls, cheerful despite colors faded with time and a bit of dust. There are a couple of clay pieces scattered about. Dean’s not an expert, but he’s pretty sure that the person who made most of them isn’t either. They’re lopsided, fingerprints showing through bright coats of paint. A gift from a friend, maybe. Maybe a younger sibling, the one in the framed picture atop the makeshift bookcase. It’s unposed. Parisa’s mother is laughing with her entire body, face turned into her headscarf, and her father is beaming at his entire family in pride. The younger brother appears to have tackled Parisa, arms wrapped around her waist, and they’re both a little off balance.

“I hope I’m overreacting,” Parisa says, nervous energy suppressed in everything but the way her fingers flicker. “But-”

“But better safe than sorry,” Benny says.

“What can you tell us?” Dean asks, straight to the point.

Parisa’s hands still. “That’s not why I--” She stops, takes a deep breath. She might not have been planning to ask them, but she’s far too smart to turn them down what she thinks is a small pack of bounty hunters offering to track someone down.“But yes, thank you.”

“Why don’t you start at the beginning?” Charlie asks.

Parisa hands over a small picture. The man is blond and smiling. It’s low quality, on regular paper, clearly run off on a printer not designed for photos. Probably the one in the corner. Parisa may not have been planning on asking them for help, but she was prepared if they offered. Dean likes her, the sharp, detailed way she draws a story.

“Ryan went to Kansas City for the weekend to blow off some steam,” Parisa says. “He’s been - he got through his comprehensives, but he’s gearing up for a bunch of experiments, and he desperately needed to let loose. I haven’t heard from him since Friday night, but I don’t know where along there - he didn’t show up to his lab this morning, and now he’s not answering his messages or email.”

“What’s his last name again?” Charlie asks. “Sorry, I’ve only met him a couple of times.”

“Coburn,” Parisa says.

Dean shifts a little, feels weird against his will that Charlie’s met Parisa’s friends when they’re just meeting her for the first time, but that’s - it makes sense, really, and also this isn’t the time or place. “That normal?” he asks.

Parisa nods. “Yeah,” she says. “At least, not hearing from him for a few days. But he had a set of viral trials to start this morning, and everything is going to voicemail. His supervisor hasn’t heard from him either.”

“Okay,” Benny says. “That’s good. Maybe he’s going to show up this afternoon with a dead cell phone.”

“I hope so,” Parisa says, but shakes her head. “He’s been getting ready for this set of experiments for weeks, and if he doesn’t get the mosquito exposures timed just right he’s going to have to start from scratch. It’ll push his thesis back by--” she takes a deep breath. “But cars break down, and phones die. I called the cops, here and in Missouri, but all I really have is a couple of hours of not showing up for school.”

“What kind of car does he drive?” Dean asks. “We’ll keep an eye out for it on the road,” he says, nodding as she describes it, then “those experiments of his, can you get them going without starting some kind of zombie virus plague?”

She shakes her head. “I study how monoculture and pesticide use impact insect biodiversity. I don’t know enough about viral transmission.”

“Okay,” Dean says, like those are all totally normal words he understands. “Can you find someone else who does?”

She thinks for a few minutes, then nods. “I think so,” she says.

“Good,” Dean says. “Wouldn’t want him to get stuck with a box of mosquitoes for any longer than he has to.” 

The way she looks at Dean means she’s smart enough to know that he’s giving her something to do to keep herself occupied, but she’s also practical enough to grab it with both hands. “Right,” she says. And “okay.”

“He asked me to go with him,” Parisa says as she precisely places bottles of water and apples and trail mix and a small bag of pitas into a cardboard box. “But my field site was flooded out this week, and Friday was the first time it dried up enough for me to actually get out there and collect samples.” She stops when Charlie rests a hand on top of hers and they just breathe for a minute. “For the road,” Parisa says roughly, handing the box to Benny, who takes it with a small smile and sincere thank you. “You’ll find him?” Parisa asks all of them, but mostly Charlie.

Dean stiffens, and he looks at Charlie with a warning in his eyes that she doesn’t see because she’s focused on Parisa.

“We’ll do our best,” Charlie promises, and Dean unwinds a bit, because yeah, the best-case scenario is that Ryan’s broken down on the road between here and Kansas City and cursing his cell phone and every car that won’t stop, but the worst-case is that he’s been missing for almost 72 hours already.

Dean calls Sam from the rickety stairs outside the apartment building while Charlie and Benny sort through the boxes of IDs in the trunk. “FBI,” he tells them. “Crosses state lines.”

Dean listens to Sam’s silence on the other end of the line. “Look. I know this isn’t normally what we do,” Dean says.

“No,” Sam says. “It is. It is what we do. Hunting things is only half of the motto. Let me know what I can do to help.”

*

“The hell is it with that city and bugs?” Dean finally asks, when they’re out of Manhattan. They’ve been driving, silent, for a half-hour, as prairie and pasture and fields starting to ripen amber flicker by in the dying light. Benny’s in the rear driver’s side seat, keen eyes glued to the other side of the divided highway as he looks for a silver Ford Focus that Dean’s not super hopeful they’re going to find.

Benny laughs, but in the rearview mirror, Dean can see he doesn’t look away from the road. “Beats me. How many bug zoos and butterfly gardens can one city sustain anyhow?”

“Kansas State has one of the best entomology programs in the world,” Charlie says, clearly proud on Parisa’s behalf. She’s in the front seat beside Dean, shoes off, feet up, and laptop out. “And they have this insect museum on campus that’s really freaking cool. One of her friends has a blue tarantula as a pet, and she let me hold it.”

Dean shudders a bit because yes, he’s seen the photo on Charlie’s phone of Parisa with a giant-ass tarantula crawling on her head while Parisa beamed out at Charlie behind the camera. “Hard pass,” he says.

“What kind of person looks at a giant spider and risks genetic engineering it just to make it blue?” Benny asks.

“Old man confused by new technology?” Dean asks and laughs.

Benny snorts, good-natured. “Please, professor, dazzle me with your knowledge. Explain to me how genetic engineering works.”

Dean shrugs. “Pretty sure whatever mumbojumbo they use is too expensive to use to give Anansi a teenage rebellion dye job,” he says, not because he’s looked into the possibility of actually getting to develop Spider-Man powers or anything. “Especially when they live what, a few years?”

Charlie mutters something under her breath about ‘decades’ that Dean pretends not to hear, especially because Benny _chortles_.

“There are actually a couple of species of blue tarantulas,” Charlie says distractedly as she hacks something or another. “From Venezuela, Myanmar, Thailand.”

“What I’m hearing is that my decision to stick to the continental United States is actually a great one,” Dean says.

Charlie laughs.

“No,” Dean says, because there’s a bright and broad undertone to the sound that tells him she’s about to drop some information he doesn’t want to learn. Like the entire thing about duck penises, or how a cockroach takes more than a week to starve to death with its head cut off. “Charlie, stop.”

“There are more than four dozen species of tarantula native to North America,” she says.

Dean’s lip twitches. Benny laughs from the back seat.

“But most of them are honestly pretty harmless,” she says. “No matter how scary they look.”

Dean lets out a long exhale and keeps his eyes pointedly on the road, doesn’t look at his own hands on the wheel or at Benny in the rearview mirror.

“Oh no,” she says, what sounds like an almost instinctual reaction.

“What is it?” Dean asks, hands tightening on the wheel.

“Ryan hasn’t used his cards or phone since Saturday night,” she says.

None of them say anything, but Dean feels his stomach drop. Charlie starts typing again. Benny continues to stare out the window, looking for a car that Dean’s less and less hopeful they’ll find.

*

The I70 is the only direct route to Kansas City from Manhattan. When they’re leaving from the Bunker, the 36 is just as fast and that’s what Dean usually picks.

He loves the I70 to the west, the way the Rockies unspool before you, the wild, breathless beauty and starkly angled rocks of the San Rafael Swell, the weathered rolling hills that look like blankets of earth drawn over slumbering giants.

To the east, the I70 cuts through Lawrence.

*

Cuts through Lawrence might be an exaggeration. The I70 butts up against the city, nudges at edges that creep closer every year and in some places have lept to the north side of the highway. Housing developments with low, long single-story homes push against it from the south, here and there giving way to the chainlink fences of schools and parks. It doesn’t take them through the center of town like it does in other cities. It doesn’t leave Dean idling at red lights across from restaurants with booths he might have piled into with the rest of the football team, in another life. It doesn’t send him past a turnoff that his muscle memory would have used to send him home or by water towers he might have scaled with shaking knees and someone he wanted to impress with a view of the city at night. Maybe he’d have played catch with Sam in one of these little parks he can see through flashing chain link fences.

There’s no point in wondering about any of it, Dean reminds himself. He doesn’t even know if that’s something that he’d really want, if it came down to it, to not know that there were things going bump in the night.

Dean wonders if that’s what he would have gotten after all, if their mother hadn’t died. He thinks about the Mary he’d met in the past who’d put him to the ground. How desperate she was to get out, about how poorly Dean himself had settled with Lisa and Ben. About how much Mary reminded him of himself. He thinks about her sharp eyes and the steel in her spine and he thinks she probably wouldn’t have continued to bend for long before she drew herself upright. He realizes, suddenly, that he is six years older than Mary was when she was killed, almost a quarter of her lifetime older than she got a chance to be.

There’s not much point in wondering, in might have beens. Lebanon always smells a little like smoke to him, a constant tickle that he knows is at the back of his head rather than in the back of his throat. _Look after Sammy,_ he hears for a moment, and then there’s a soft warm pressure just brushing his thigh. Out of the corner of his eye Dean sees that Charlie, still pretzeled up on the seat with her laptop, has shifted so that her back is against the car door and her toes are pressed lightly against the side of his thigh. She is deliberately not looking at him. There’s a weight at the back of his neck, too, and he realizes that Benny’s hand is resting there, cupped against his trapezoid, thumb resting along his spine. Dean inhales, deliberately loosening the death grip he hadn’t realized he had on the steering wheel.

They’re well into the dissected till plains by the time Lawrence falls away behind them, landscape around them alternating between farmland and close-pressed mixes of scrubby poplars and cottonwoods and oaks. The closer they get to Kansas City the more frequent small muddy streams get, nudging against the highway before peeling off again. Larger streams cut into the rock that passes under them, slowly giving way to full-blown creeks with bridges splitting across them as the sun flees below the horizon.

Benny stares intent and quiet out the window into the dark, long past any point of reasonable hope of Ryan’s car. Dean watches passing headlights reflect off his eyes in the rearview mirror.

*

The guy at the motel desk is heavily invested in the telenovela on the CRT TV mounted in the corner of the office. It sounds like Manuela just discovered that Berto had been lying about having an affair with Oscar to cover up his _actual_ affair with her twin sister, so Dean doesn’t blame him.

The guy, distracted, automatically starts to push a single key across the desk.

“Yeah, no,” Charlie says. “We’re going to need two rooms.” Adds “For three people,” because Benny’s out at the car, having a snack.

The guy shrugs, and there’s a flicker of a second where Dean thinks he’s going to say something like _we’re full up, that’s the last room_ or _all we have left is singles_ , and he tells himself that there’s definitely nothing in his stomach or behind his tired eyes that falls when the guy unearths another key.

 _There’s a kid missing_ , he tells whatever his stomach is going. _Stop being shitty._

(Ryan is four years younger than Charlie. Charlie is thirty. Mary was twenty-eight. Dean wonders if Mary ever got a chance to be a child.)

Manuela’s twin sister appears to be an army general.

“Go on,” Dean says, waving Charlie on ahead with the keys as he pulls out his card. She heads out into the chilly night air where Benny is leaning against the hood of the Impala, arms crossed tight across his chest, almost like he’s cold. “What channel is this on?” Dean asks as he signs the book.

*

One of the rooms they got keys to has the safety lock flipped out to prop it open, so he pushes inside. His stuff is sitting in a neat pile on the orange and purple bedspread of the bed farthest from the door. Benny’s coat is slung across a chair and he’s crouching by the mini-fridge, carefully transferring blood bags from his cooler. A lifetime lived in motels means Dean doesn’t get the feeling this is the kind of place they’ll be warding off housekeeping from before they leave, but he slides the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the door to ward off any awkward questions.

He stands there for a minute, looking at the way Benny’s shirt pulls across his shoulders, at Benny’s bed between him and the door.

 _You’re allowed to want things_ , Sam said.

Dean lets himself drop down on his mattress, fumbling the remote from the table between the two beds. He clicks around until he finds the telenovela, clicks past and back around until he lands on it a second time and lets it play on low, the dramatic swell of music filling the room.

“I swear, you were born in a barn,” Benny says, pushing Dean’s legs as he passes so that Dean’s boots hang off the comforter.

Dean slurps, deliberately noisy, at a bottle of water from Parisa’s travel box. He can still feel Benny’s hand on his ankle.

The worst thing about letting yourself want things, even in a peripheral sideways way, is that you’re aware when you don’t get them.

*

In the morning, they have a carefully itemized list of places Ryan had used his credit cards and cell towers he’d pinged (thanks to Charlie) and an email from Jody about the important highlights of looking for a non-supernaturally missing person.

Ryan isn’t at the motel he’d booked. They’d rolled his room over to the next day when he didn’t check out and didn’t respond to calls. All of his stuff is still there, but Dean has to wave his badge at a housekeeper getting ready to box everything up, get her to get the manager down to talk to them.

Ryan’s room looks like any other room that someone doesn’t actually live in, really. Trifold tourist maps on the single desk beside a laptop, limp arm of a sleeve fluttering from where it’s been tossed over a bag, uneven spill of toiletries on the bathroom counter, pomade half-open and filling the room with the faint scent of beeswax. Benny starts going carefully through the bag. Dean opens up the maps, sees a nearby sushi restaurant circled, heavy lines around a late-night chicken and waffle place. It takes Charlie no time at all to crack the password on Ryan’s laptop, and it opens to a spreadsheet that makes Dean dizzy. 

“He’s not too good at taking a break, huh,” Dean says, peering over Charlie’s shoulder.

“Don’t know about that,” Benny says, replacing condoms and lube into an inner pocket of the bag. 

“That’s my man,” Dean says, grinning. He thinks he likes the picture of Ryan he’s putting together - work hard, play hard, eat good food, find what you want to do and go for it - even if the dude is obsessed with mosquitoes. (Kevin eats black licorice for fun, and Dean likes him just fine.)

“Nothing here we don’t already know,” Charlie says, putting the computer back to sleep. 

Dean places the maps carefully back where he found them, because they still don’t know if this is a regular missing persons case. 

“I’ve got his scent,” Benny says. 

“Okay,” Dean says. Adjusts his cuffs.

“His car’s been impounded,” Charlie says, looking up from her phone. 

He’s not at The Frog Pond, the club that was the last place his card was used, a rainbow-bannered place in West Bottom, cradled below the slow arc of the Kansas River winding its way into the wider Missouri. Benny’s nose flares in the alley out back in a way that Dean doesn’t like. “He bled here,” Benny says. Rainbows in fluorescent against the brick behind him. “Not to death. Not enough blood for that.” He tries to follow the scent out of the alley but ends up confused on the street corner. “Too many people since then,” Benny says when he’s tromped back.

Dean shrugs. He shifts wooden pallets leaning against the brick walls because there’s a weird tension digging through his gut. His shoulders feel tight, fight to draw up against his neck. He doesn’t know why. It’s not like he was expecting - The alley smells pretty much like you’d expect the alley behind a club to smell, garbage and lingering smoke, sweat and the spill of a variety of bodily fluids - and he’s surprised Benny can smell anything through it. Dean lets the pallet drop back against the brick, fighting the urge to hiss as his forearm tightens. He turns around, looking at Benny standing there, haloed by vivid lines of graffiti, feel his arm seize up as the muscle memory of the swing of a machete starts to intrude. _What are you waiting for?_ he hears Benny snarl. Closes his eyes for just a second against the double exposure of the alleyways, can remind himself of Benny’s hand carding through his hair as he rumbled _I’m glad I’m here_. He opens his eyes and Benny is still framed against the graffiti, but Dean remembers Benny’s hand working at the stiff muscles of his forearm and deliberately relaxes it. Benny looks back at him, like Dean’s heart is doing something funny.

“Okay,” Charlie says, popping out of the back door of the club, looking like her conversation wasn’t any more productive than theirs. “Let’s go put the fear of god into the locals.”

*

The KCPD seem to take a trio of FBI agents a little more seriously than they did an out-of-state grad student freaked out that another student skipped half a day of school. Dean - Dean’s kind of figured all along that if nothing else, they could do something about making sure that the local police take the missing persons case seriously. There are far too many missing posters scattered around the bullpen, and Dean wonders if this is what all the missing persons divisions are like, everyone exhausted by reaching for all the things defined by their absence, and fielding constant calls from people’s loved ones. Robinson, the lead detective in the division, is gruff, sympathetic but of absolutely no help, and seems extremely worn down.

“Comes as a surprise to most people, but Kansas City is one of the most dangerous cities in the country,” Robinson tells Charlie and Dean. Talks about per capita violent crime rates more than 330% above the national average, about visitors who don’t know what parts of town are safe. Robinson is professional, but her voice has a sliver of gentleness in it, like she can see that the only reason for the FBI to be asking around this early on is a personal connection. 

Dean bumps Charlie with his shoulder, listens to Robinson talk, watches Benny stare intently at the faded faces on old missing persons fliers, hand resting against the worn edge of one where it curls up. 

“He’s probably dead,” Charlie says while they’re sitting in the Impala outside the Frog Pond. Dean, chin resting atop arms crossed on the steering wheel, shrugs. They’d gone back to ask some questions of the staff just before opening. They’d been recalcitrant. Considering the kind of bar it was and the type of relationship they must have with local law enforcement, objectively Dean doesn’t really blame them, but it’s frustrating as fuck.

“Probably,” Dean says, because he’s waiting for Benny to say something reassuring from the backseat but it never comes.

“Yeah,” Charlie says.

The lack of activity on his cards or phone. The vacant hotel room and impounded car. The blood in the alley, even if it wasn’t enough to kill him on the spot. Maybe there was a pulmonary embolism that sent him stumbling out of the club with smoke in his lungs, coughing blood. Maybe it was a mugging. Maybe someone just didn’t like the look of him. This isn’t their normal lane.

Maybe someone just didn’t like the look of him, Dean thinks again.

Dean knows distantly, intellectually, that if he was a regular person his being bi or whatever would make him less safe. If he’d spent his life living within the bounds of society. Probably it still does, but it’s not much compared to monsters and witches and demons and feather-winged dicks of the apocalypse.

“We’ll check the hospitals first,” Benny says. _Before the morgues_ goes unsaid.

“What do I tell Parisa?” Charlie asks.

Dean shrugs again. He’s exhausted in a way he doesn’t usually feel. He sits up and reaches for the keys to start the car.

“That we’re still looking,” Benny says.

*

The hospitals come up empty, but so does the morgue.

“Okay,” Dean says, finally, when they’re standing outside the last morgue in town, fists deep in their Fed coats and staring at their feet. “I’m calling it for the day.” He expects someone to protest.

“Yeah,” Charlie says. Pulls her hair tie so that her ponytail cascades down. Twists it back up again. Down, up, down. Benny catches her hand gently, pulls the hair tie twined through her fingers into his pocket. She bumps her shoulder against his. Exhales. “Yeah, let’s head back.”

*

“I don’t know what else to do,” Dean tells Jody, sitting outside the motel room, phone pressed to his ear. The sidewalk underneath him is still releasing heat. He nudges the ice bucket on the pavement with his toe.

“Not really anything else you can do, Dean,” Jody says. “You know better than anyone how easy it is to disappear in this country.”

The difference, Dean thinks, is that no one’s usually looking for him. “Yeah,” he says.

“You did your best,” Jody says, and Dean wonders selfishly if this is why he called her.

“Yeah,” Dean says. “Thanks.”

“You sound like crap,” she says. “Try to get some sleep.”

*

Benny’s got the blankets pulled up over his shoulder, curled up on his side with his back to the door and pretending to be asleep. Dean knows he’s faking because it’s early still and Benny doesn’t need much sleep, and also because his breath is regular, deep and even. When Benny sleeps - really, deeply sleeps - sometimes the camouflage falters and his breath stops, or runs shallow.

 _Be that way_ , Dean doesn’t say, exhausted and soul-weary. Just keeps the bucket of ice cradled under his arm and snags the Jack from his bag before he heads over to Charlie’s room.

She just nods at him when she opens the door for him, and Dean doesn’t even pretend to click around randomly before landing on the telenovela. Miguela and her sister appear to be stuck together in some kind of ambush, with an opposing militia raining down fire around them as they tearfully reconcile.

“Martina?” the sisters gasp as they are taken captive, the leader of the militia striding into the frame. Before she fades to black and then the credits, Dean can see that she shares the shape of their noses and their dark brows.

“Secret extra sister, yesssss,” Charlie hisses, holding out her glass for Dean to tip more whiskey into. Dean wonders if there’s a world where he met Charlie through Parisa and Ryan; where Dean’s a part-time grad student who makes the hour drive back to Lawrence on the weekends, takes vacations with Mary to run down ghosts and vamps. Where during summer session they make the trip out to California to go hunting with Sam, roll the Impala through the sharp peaks of the Rockies, through the Pahvant Range and the flat deserts of Nevada and up through the Cascades until they land in Palo Alto in the rainshadows of the Santa Cruz mountains. Maybe there, right now, he and Ryan are sharing that cheap motel room and Dean’s throat is rough from use as they talk about disease vectors and engine design and conquests into the early morning 

There’s a muffled vibration from the bed beside Charlie, and Dean looks over her body to see her phone lit up, picture on the screen of Parisa grinning with a tarantula on her head.

Dean takes her glass as she rolls upright into a sitting position. 

“I should,” she says, gesturing vaguely.

“Yeah,” Dean says, putting her drink down on the bedside table beside his empty glass, ice cubes rapidly melting and faint dregs of amber washed out. “Goodnight,” he says. Kisses the top of her head as she picks up her phone. 

“Hey,” he hears her say as the door closes behind him. 

Dean stands in the cool night air for a minute or two, rolling the neck of the bottle in his hand, breathing in the smell of asphalt and exhaust and the distant, murky river.

Benny’s still lying exactly where he was when Dean left before, deep and even breathing betraying him as awake. There’s enough space that Dean could crawl in beside him, if he thought he’d be welcome, but Benny’s been - Benny’s been off all day. 

Dean thinks about Benny’s hand resting, almost absently, at the curled bottom of that missing person poster, and squeezes Benny’s leg lightly on his way to the bathroom. He does it without thinking, and fights the urge to thump his head against the bathroom door as he washes his face, brushes his teeth. He has pajamas, but the thought of stripping down and putting them on makes him feel - edgy and vulnerable, so he slips into bed in his jeans and an undershirt.

Dean crawls into bed and lies on his stomach. closes his eyes into his pillow and rests one arm under his face. Lies there and tries to sleep until the thought of it is just too much. “What’s going on with you?” he finally asks, when the weight of the two of them lying there, both pretending to sleep, gets to be more than he can bear.

“I told you I wasn’t always this cute and cuddly,” Benny says, around when Dean’s started thinking he’s going to go all-in on pretending to sleep.

“Yeah,” Dean says. Turns his head out of his pillow so he’s looking at Benny. “Your nest took you out in the 1960s, and you weren’t even born in that century. I do can the math.” In the low city light cutting through the drapes, he can see the faintest shadows and outlines of Benny’s face. Benny can probably see Dean’s as clear as day.

“I tell you about Sorento?” Benny asks.

“I didn’t like him,” Dean says.

Benny snorts. “You never met him.”

“I didn’t like any of them,” Dean says. It’s not quite true - on some level, he felt sorry for Andrea. She hadn’t asked to be turned. Had gotten Benny back and turned away from him. He’d liked her for who she had to have been, before. But he’d hated all of them, a little. Not just because they were vamps, but because - “But I especially didn’t like Sorento,” he says. “Asshole killed you.” Killed Benny while another vamp held him down, last thing Benny saw the Old Man ripping Andrea’s throat out.

Benny’s exhale sounds loud, carries the weight of whatever emotion spurred it. “I returned the favor.”

“Good,” Dean says. Firmly. “Eye for an eye and all that.”

Benny laughs, and it’s a bitter sound. “Puts me one up, actually,” he says.

Dean waits. Meets Benny’s eyes in the dark. Waits. “I can do the math,” he repeats.

Benny just - “It seemed more sporting,” he says. “When we were on land, I mean, not taking over boats, when we were ashore - it seemed more sporting, if it was a man I lured down an alley.”

“Yeah,” Dean says. “I can see that.”

“Sorento,” Benny says. Stops. Dean can do the math.

Dean can hear the rush of the plumbing in the walls as someone in another room climbs into the shower. He wonders how many people Benny can hear, how many hearts beating. “You and Sorento -”

“Sometimes,” Benny says. “Here and there. Before Andrea.”

Dean realizes that in the same way he wonders if there’s a world where he met Charlie through Parisa and Ryan, Benny wonders if there’s a world where he’s the reason Ryan’s missing.

Dean wishes they were in the same bed. He wishes their beds were close enough that he could reach out and rest his hand on Benny’s shoulder. “Being a jilted lover didn’t give him an excuse to kill you, though,” Dean says, finally. “ _But officer, he broke up with me_ has never once stood up in court.”

Benny laughs, and it’s a real, deep sound. “You ain’t wrong, brother,” he says, and his voice is fond.

Dean wishes he’d killed Sorento, if only so that Benny wasn’t carrying it all, like Benny carried Andrea’s death but not the final separation of her head from her body. “Get some sleep,” Dean says. Staring across at Benny in the dark. “Long drive tomorrow.”

Eventually, he hears Benny’s breath soften, become less even. Dean lies awake, head still turned to watch him sleep, as he listens to distant traffic and water in pipes and other sounds of life.

*

Dean’s phone goes off at six in the morning. He’d probably be pissy about it if he’d actually been asleep.

Wanting things is bullshit. Getting used to having things is bullshit. 

Dean’s phone rings, and Benny’s silent in a bed that feels like it’s mountains away. Benny’s eyes reflect the light from the screen of Dean’s phone as he picks up a call he already knows the answer to. 

“They’re bringing in a John Doe,” Detective Robinson says. “Found him in the river, so it’s a little hard to tell, but the general description is right.”

*

It’s him.

*

Charlie can’t decide between calling Parisa to tell her, or waiting to do it in person. She settles for calling her, because it’s getting late and Dean doesn’t know if he’s good to drive all night. She locks herself into Benny and Dean’s bathroom to make the call.

When she comes out she’s dry-eyed. “I didn’t even know him that well,” she says, sounding a little lost and a little confused. “Just met him a couple of times. I didn’t even know his last name,” she says, sitting gingerly on the side of Benny’s bed and absently grabbing a throw pillow. “He wasn’t even my friend,” she says.

Dean wants to say something about putting it down and moving along, but what comes out is, “But he could have been.”

“Yeah,” Charlie says, and looks a little glassy. “Yeah, I think he could have been.”

Benny moves over to open his arms and she shakes her head, but she lets herself tilt sideways into him when he settles beside her on the mattress. Hands move restlessly like she thinks there’s something she could or should be doing, but there’s nothing. “Is it wrong that I almost wish it was some kind of monster that had killed him? At least then there’d be something we could do.”

Dean orders food. Kisses the top of Charlie’s head on his way out the door.

He called in way too much BBQ from what the internet told him was the best place in town, what turns out to be an unassuming white and green building attached to a gas station of all things, brick peering through the white paint, retro lettering spelling out ‘Joe’s Kansas City Bar-B-Que’ on the site. It’s teeming with life inside, though, and Dean stands in the pickup line between a family chattering about their soccer game and women arguing about book club and thinks about the corpse. Somewhere he hears a dude say “look, I know it’s a meme, but if you’ve slept together that many times it is seriously _not a bromance_.” Dean thinks about the cut on Ryan’s neck, the fact that there was water in his stomach and his lungs but nothing to suggest he’d fallen from a bridge or jumped. Someone in another line is talking about Desperate Housewives. _We see perimortem cuts like that on river bodies sometimes,_ the coroner had said. _The Missouri is full of rocks and branches and rebar._ There hadn’t exactly been a way to tell the man that the vampire member of their trio had smelled the blood in an alley a ways from the river. _And the body had to have caught on something, or it would have been farther downstream before we found it._ The line in front of Dean has disappeared, and the cashier is smiling at him less than patiently.

“Sorry,” Dean says and hands the kid a credit card on autopilot, has to surreptitiously crane his head to check which name is on the card he handed over. _We’ll know more when the toxicology report comes back, but I’m guessing he was drunk, or on something, and decided to go for a swim without realizing how impaired he was,_ the coroner had said. _Happens more often than you’d think, especially in the summer._

“Thanks,” Dean says, giving the cashier a smile that is returned only on the kid’s mouth but not his eyes, and Dean stuffs a generous tip into the jar.

 _We see perimortem cuts like on river bodies sometimes,_ the coroner had said, and it looked like Ryan had just - walked into the river. Cut on his neck. Blood in the alley. Dean had passed off hesitation on the face of the bartender Dean’d been pumping for information as being about local asshole cops, but it had shown up when Dean had asked about _a_ missing person.

Dean carefully sets the too-large pile of containers on the floor in the back of the Impala, shifting them around so they’re steady, and sits behind the wheel as the smell of roasted meat and the sugar-smoke-vinegar of good BBQ sauce fills the car. The coroner’s office sees cuts like that on river bodies often enough that they brushed it off, he thinks.

Dean calls Sam. “Hey,” Dean says, and stops. He tries to figure out if he’s trying to turn this into something that it isn’t so that there’s something, anything he can do. If he just doesn’t want it to end like this, so many questions in between and nothing they did making a difference. “Can you look into something for me?”

*

Dean wakes up again when the phone is his pocket starts to vibrate. He carefully tries to extricate himself from Charlie without waking her. Last night they’d torn through so much of the BBQ that Dean had thought he was going to be sick and Charlie had idly flipped channels until she found the absolute worst, most over the top movie on, and had lain down with her head cradled on her crossed arms at the end of Dean’s bed to watch it. The TV’s still on, but muted, early morning news anchors silently chirping against a blue soundstage. Benny’s sitting on the edge of the bed, awake, watching, apparently uncaring that Dean’s head is nestled against his hip. His phone buzzes again, and Benny leans over to shift Charlie’s arm and let Dean slip out from underneath. She stretches a little but drops back off. “Thanks,” Dean mouths at Benny. He catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror as he steps quietly out to the parking lot, his hair pushed to the side like someone’s been running their fingers through it. Outside, the sun is just starting to come up and the air is cool.

Dean calls Sam back.

“How much do you know about hungry ghosts?” Sam asks.

*

Ryan isn’t the first one to go missing and turn up in the river. “A lot of them - a lot of them are unrelated,” Sam says. “Four women in the 80s and 90s found without legs,” he says. “Others were - obvious crimes of passion, or just --”

“Yeah,” Dean says, watching the sun come up. “At least monsters are usually hungry,” he says. People are --

“Yeah,” Sam says and sighs, and Dean wonders if he’s thinking of that time the cannibals wanted to make a meal of them, too, or if he’s thinking of hell, or if he’s -- “but there’s a series of disappearances,” Sam says, “from the area. Some from that bar. Some of them never show. Four of them turn up in the river. Cuts on the neck.”

“Okay,” Dean says. Nothing he hadn’t put together there. “But nothing about that adds up to-”

“There was one they hauled out of the water before he drowned,” Sam says. “Cut on his neck. Stomach full to exploding of water. They hauled him out and he kept asking for water until he just kind of - drifted off, like there was nothing left in him. They called it heart failure, but what they meant was that all of sudden, his heart just kind of - slowed down.”

“If he’d still been in the river…” Dean says, can see the anonymous man slowly sinking below the dark surface without a struggle, bubbles escaping from nose and open mouth as he gulps in, breathes in silt and water, eyes unblinking and staring upwards.

*

Dean tries to enter the motel room quietly but sees there’s not much reason as soon as he opens the door. Charlie’s up, too, and she and Benny are sitting up at the head of Dean’s bed, watching the same muted newscast. Charlie has a leftover container of pulled pork balanced on her pulled-up knees and is eating it cold while Benny works his way through a blood bag.

“Looks like we have a preta on our hands,” Dean says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content note/trigger warning: A queer friend of Parisa's goes missing, and later turns up dead. There's some discussion of whether this could have been a homophobic attack, but it turns out to be a monster-related death.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We have a rating increase!
> 
> We also have a short epilogue in the next chapter, just wrapping some things up.

Charlie wants to go charging in full steam ahead, of course. Dean gets it, he does, but -- “Sam’s still doing research,” he says. “Neither of us has even heard of one before, and he’s working from a couple of lines of translated text in an old book. We don’t know how to find one, let alone kill it.”

“Right,” Charlie says. She opens up her laptop and starts typing in a precise and controlled way that makes it extremely clear she’d rather be punching something.

By the end of the day, with the help of Google Translate, they know a little more. Mostly that the preta is a common figure across a lot of east Asia. Kevin remembers some extremely basic Mandarin from childhood lessons, but none of it covers arcane texts. There’s a text in the bunker that Sam tells Dean, with frustration, is probably exactly what they need. Sam sends him a picture of an illustration, an emaciated, wretched thing barely human, desperately trying to lap up spilled water with a mouth too small, a throat too tight to drink. The book would probably be exactly what they needed, if any of them could read Japanese. There’s a long silence then, and Dean says “yeah, I miss Bobby too.”

It feels weird to put words to it.

By the end of the day, they know this -- despite the name, the preta appears to be more a revenant than a ghost. That they thirst and hunger constantly, and no matter what they consume, it’s never enough. They lure victims with the promise of what they hunger for, which explains why a club, thick with desire, is such a fertile hunting ground.

“They start to feed with the blood,” Sam says. He’s on speaker, voice echoing from Dean’s phone on the table. “They start with the blood, but their throats close up, and it’s not enough for them. Then they feed on - the soul, I think the translation is, or the life force. The desire. And then the victim just - wanders off, out of their mind with thirst, until they run down.”

“Okay,” Dean says. He wants to say - that sounds like a terrible way to die, hollow and wanting, your last minutes desperate to fill a yearning void that opened inside of you as even your soul was hollowed out, and he wonders for a fleeting moment if that’s how he’s lived his life - but Ryan is someone Charlie could have been friends with, and he holds his tongue.

What they don’t know is how to find one, or how to kill it. There are rituals in some of the books, but Dean doesn’t trust Google Translate with his life. Doesn’t know enough about the provenance of these books and websites to know if they’d be reliable if he got someone to translate them, or if they’d be the equivalent of ‘crosses and garlic against vampires.’

*

Dean calls Isip. He turns the idea over and over in his head. Her first name was Priya, he remembers, picturing the engraved nameplate propped on her desk. The coroner picks up after a couple of rings, like she’s wrist-deep in a ribcage or she’s wrestling with herself about if she wants to respond to his call.

“What’s up, Doc?” Dean asks, because he can’t help himself. “Kill anyone lately?” he asks with false brightness, like he hasn’t been checking for weird deaths out in Provo.

“Three different men who bothered me at work,” Isip says, and Dean hears the sound of a bone saw.

He waits for it to end. More patient than he feels. When it’s over, Dean hears feet moving around on tiles. “Did your parents really name you, a wraith, Nice Brain? Is your name _actually_ Doctor Nice Brain, because I gotta tell you, I’ll give you major props if you picked that out yourself.” Dean hears a metal instrument hitting a tray, the sound of gloves being stripped off. “Do wraiths have parents anyway, or--”

Isip laughs, just a bit. “No, we burst fully formed from Zeus’s head,” she says. “And it’s more commonly translated as beloved or loveable, and mind.”

Dean laughs, and it feels like the first real full one he’s had in days. “Doctor-Loves-Brains,” he says.

“My father had a sense of humor,” she says, and it’s the least sharp he’s heard her.

“Had,” Dean says, and he thinks about how young his mother was when she died.

“Yeah,” Isip says. “My mother killed him,” she says finally.

Dean catches his breath because he’s not sure which way this is going to go. If they were both wraiths, or--

“He spent most of his life on the straight and narrow, but one day -- I guess one day, he just got hungry,” Isip says. Dean doesn’t say anything. He thinks about yellow-eyed demons and red-eyed demons and fires that burn until there’s nothing left of a family to eat. About Sam with demon blood running down his chin, of Benny’s nostrils flaring at the scent of blood.

“We all have an origin story,” Isip says into the silence.

Dean inhales. He thinks about John, consumed with the need for revenge. About Famine. About what it’s like to not eat for days. About being worn to sinew and bone or how it took him all this time to realize that Purgatory stripped even the scent of a person, stripped the color of Benny’s eyes.

He thinks about legless bodies pulled from the Missouri. “Here’s the thing,” Dean says. “We all get to decide what kind of person we want to be.”

There’s a short, huffing laugh on the other end of the line, the softest thing Dean’s heard from her.

“You ever heard of something called a preta?” Dean asks.

*

“Preta,” Isip says, then “pret, praet, gaki. Hungry ghosts. They’re common in the folklore across a lot of east Asia.”

Dean snorts. “And in hipster bands trying to look worldly,” he says. “If I stumble across another whiny song about wanting…”

On the other end of the line, Isip harrumphs. “Screwing your google results something fierce, I guess.” A door closes, and when Isip’s voice comes again, the metallic echo is gone. “That how you found out about my name? You googling me, white boy?”

Dean waves his hand distractedly at the empty room. “Obviously?” he replies. He walked away, but he’s not stupid.

“Fair,” Isip says. “I see FBI reports of your demise have been greatly exaggerated,” because she’s not stupid either.

Dean shrugs. “Am I officially dead right now?” he asks absently, because honestly, it’s kind of hard to keep track.

What sounds like distant country music pops on in the background of Isip’s line. “Your life is a Cretan maze,” she says around a mouthful of something Dean tries not to think about. “You ever been to Thailand?” she asks, finally.

“You ever been to Kansas City?” he fires back.

“Yes, actually,” she says, and “Bra pae nee sat duan sib. Record low for Nakhon Si Thammarat in September is 68 degrees. During the Ching Pret Ceremony they make ritual offerings to our ancestors. Food, mostly. There are hungry ghost festivals most of the places Buddhism and Taoism have touched.” 

When she talks, Dean closes his eyes. Thinks he can feel the overwhelming press of humidity, see the towering white statues of skeletal preta against the blue of the sky.

“There’s a difference between the folklore about a hungry ghost and a preta,” she says. “I haven’t run into one here. Segaki ritual’s probably a good place to start.”

“Any chance you read Thai?” Dean asks. Opens his eyes to the harsh fluorescents of the bathroom, feels almost surprised that there’s no rush of cars or swing of green leaves. 

Isip is silent for a long time, like she’s weighing her options. Weighing the odds Dean’ll change his mind and take her out against his response if she gets something wrong. Against the lives at stake. “Send me what you have and I’ll see what I can do.”

*

Dean calls Sam. “Pick up some sushi on your way.”

“Are you possessed?” Sam asks. “Put Charlie on the line.”

“We’re going to need the rice,” Dean says. Tilts back in his chair and passes the phone to Charlie anyway. 

“Grab me a rainbow roll and some unagi,” Charlie says.

Dean looks at the translation on the table in front of him. Thinks about Wendigos. About how every culture seems to have a story about hunger so terrible it transforms you.

*

The case files of the other potential victims of the preta are spread out on the table in front of them when Benny’s head turns automatically towards the door. After a long second there’s a knock and Sam’s low voice saying “It’s us.”

Dean opens the door and tosses Sam the key to another room. Sam looks at it and frowns.

“Yeah, I know,” Dean says, because it’s on the second floor, and he knows Sam feels the same way as he does about being a floor up, prefers windows you can roll from and a straight line to the car. “I flashed my badge and everything, but it’s what they have.”

“Okay,” Sam says, and heads back to the car Kevin is still sitting in the front seat of.

Dean flips the lock to prop the door open while Sam and Kevin haul their stuff upstairs. Stares at the photos on the table, at the photos of the four confirmed dead and three more missing they've pulled as likely victims.

Kevin staggers in first, bent under the weight of what appears to be a bag of bricks. Benny takes it from him easily, and Kevin flops on his back on Dean’s neatly made bed and groans.

Sam flicks the lock closed when he steps inside. He slides up next to Dean and it’s comfortably familiar, the way he frowns and crosses his arms, sizing up the photos Dean has spread out. “Dean,” he says, warning and low, because of course he’s already picked up on the common thread. “You’re not--”

“It’s worth a shot,” Dean says. He raises his eyebrow. “Not like we have any better leads.”

“What am I missing?” Charlie asks. She looks at the pictures on the table again, then at Dean’s relaxed posture and Sam’s scowl, looks back at the pictures and chucks the last of Parisa’s apples at Dean’s head.

Dean catches it easily and takes a bite. “It makes sense,” he says around a full mouth, he says, because there’s a certain similarity between the victims. If he was some kind of actual law enforcement officer or some egghead profiler, he’s pretty sure he’d look at his own cheekbones, his own broad jaw and say he fits the killer’s victim profile. He takes another bite of the apple, tart-crisp flesh parting easily beneath his jaws, lets the sugar dance over his tongue before he swallows.

“I don’t like it,” Benny says. He has Kevin’s heavy duffel open. It appears to be full of hardbound books, spines worn and cracked and labeled in symbols Dean can’t read.

“Join the club,” Sam says and looks at Benny with a weird kind of solidarity that gets Dean’s back up.

“Not like it would be the first time,” Dean says, finishing the core of the apple. “And at least I know what’s going on.”

Sam’s face darkens a bit, but he doesn’t say anything. He’s never really understood how casually Dean’s always taken this, but what’s done is done and he’s still kicking.

Dean frowns at the somehow still-growing stack of books that Benny’s piling on the nightstand between their beds. He raises an eyebrow at Sam. “You get a bag of holding so you can bring the entire library with you when you travel, Barty Crouch?” he asks. “You got the real Sam stashed down in the bottom of that thing somewhere?”

Sam rolls his eyes. “I thought whoever you found here to do that translation might be willing to take a look at these, too,” he says. “Make sure that the info lines up.”

Charlie looks up. “Wait. Sam, I thought you--”

Dean looks at Benny, who shrugs. Dean coughs. “Ah,” he says. Scratches his eyebrow with a finger. “Yeah, it’s no one in town here, you made Kevin your beast of burden for no good reason.”

Sam tilts his head at Dean. “You said--”

“I said I got the info we were looking for,” Dean says. “Good news is, it’s from someone who knows what the hell they’re talking about.”

“Who?” Sam asks.

Dean waves his hand. “Just some hunter,” he says. “Just someone I know.”

“Dean,” Sam says. “If we’re going on this info to use you as _bait_ I’m going to need a hell of a lot more than that to go on.”

“Just a friend,” Dean says. _A friend_ is pushing it. A lot. A - a kindred spirit maybe, someone who can see the truth beneath her skin in a mirror in a way Dean isn’t able to, most days. He’s sure that Sam isn’t going to take Isip as a reliable resource.

Sam frowns. “Dean,” he says. “All your friends-”

“All of my friends are dead, I remember,” Dean says, snaps, because that still kind of roils under his skin and he wants to put Sam on the wrong foot.

“Um,” Charlie says, and Kevin slowly raises his hand to point at himself with a raised eyebrow.

“All of your friends are in this room, I was going to say,” Sam says. “Except for Jody, and I know for a fact she doesn’t speak Thai.” He shakes his head. “It wasn’t fair when I said that. I shouldn’t have--” he stops, narrowing his eyes at Dean. “The ritual.”

“Got it translated at a massage parlor,” Dean says glibly, which would be more convincing if he hadn’t already vouched for its providence. “You think the _living_ creeps they have to deal with are a problem…”

“Dean.”

“Got a hold of Garth, but he disappeared again?”

Sam’s brows draw even lower, and Dean kind of wants him to show him his face in a mirror, because he looks a little like a bulldog, all overhanging brows and jutting jaw. “Dean,” he says again, and, fuck, Dean can recognize Sam’s Extremely Serious face. “Dean, there is no way in _hell_ we are using you as bait if we don’t know the ritual’s sound.”

Dean looks at the pictures scattered on the table, at Ryan’s smiling face. Thinks about his viral mosquitoes and whatever else he’s left behind. Can see him gulping frantically at the dark, silty water of the river trying to quench an unending thirst even with his last breath.

“Okay,” Dean says. Nods Sam into one of the chairs at the tiny round table. He hooks his foot around the leg of another one and pulls it out. He sits down heavily across from Sam. Leans forward to rest his elbows on his knees and rubs his hands together and looks up. _Hey, remember Kate?_ he wants to say. Instead, he searches around for the words as Sam slouches back with crossed arms and regards him seriously. Benny’s hands are still on a book in his lap, letting Dean decide how to play this. Charlie and Kevin are both looking at him steadily.

“Okay,” Dean says, finally. “You remember how Bobby always said nothing supernatural ever happens in Provo? Turns out there’s a reason for that.”

*

Sam doesn’t take it particularly well.

*

The ensuing fight, which includes _you’re the one who always wants to set up a rescue organization for puppy-eyed monsters_ (Dean), _Amy_ (Sam), _Kate_ (Dean), _AMY_ (Sam, again), _screw Amy, she was killing people_ (Dean), _like you and I haven’t ever killed someone to keep each other alive_ (Sam), and _what the fuck_ (both of them, multiple times) and _Don’t look at me, I was raring to drop her_ (Benny, NOT helping).

“ _Thank you_ ,” Sam tells Benny. 

“Hey,” Dean points out. “You’re acting like you aren’t both currently being proved entirely wrong.”

“You’re talking about using yourself as bait, based on the word of a monster you almost ganked,” Sam says. “I don’t know what part of that you think proves anyone wrong.”

“Um, the part where we’re going to be able to take out something that’s hurting people?” Dean lobs back.

Dean stops. Freezes. “What,” Dean says, low and slow. He can feel his heart in his throat. His eyes cut automatically to Benny, sitting on the edge of his bed, elbows on his knees and fingers intertwined, a careful study in easy far too still to be anything but a construct. He’s been bracing himself this entire fight for Martin to pop up, trying to ignore the weird, grateful tickle at the back of his throat that Sam didn’t even be appearing to think of going there, so he’s entirely unprepared for the sudden swerve Sam just made. "What," Dean repeats.

“You were thinking about Benny,” Sam says. “You benched me because you thought I wasn’t all back together yet, but all along you were thinking about the fact that Benny almost didn’t come back. That you would have killed him, and--”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Dean says. Feels his forearm tighten. Closes his eyes to stop himself from looking at Benny, and sees graffiti behind his eyelids. “She wasn’t _hurting_ anyone.”

“That you know of!” Sam says, hands moving in short, sharp arcs as he talks. “And now - and now you want to offer yourself up on a platter to some kind of monster we might not even know how to take out. Based on something you heard from a _wraith_.”

“Screw that,” Dean snarls. “We’ve walked into worse with less.”

“Yeah, hi,” Kevin says. “Hate to break this up, but Charlie and I have been doing some actual research while you two worked on getting us kicked out of the motel.”

Dean becomes aware that the next room over has been banging on the wall only when they stop. Unfortunately, it’s replaced by a hammering on their door.

“Shit,” Sam and Dean say simultaneously and go hurtling for their badges. A slipped Franklin accomplishes what all their quick-talking and fake FBI posturing can’t, and they narrowly avoid getting booted.

“Heh,” Dean says, and he and Sam grin at each other in relief, back in sync, before Sam visibly remembers he’s angry at Dean and scowls again, pushing off the wall and away from the door.

“Okay,” Charlie says. “So,” she says, rapping at the table until everyone’s looking at her. Over her shoulder, Dean can see Benny sitting away from the rest of the group, sitting aggressively casually at the head of his bed. Dean looks pointedly between Benny and the table until Benny gets up to join the rest of them. 

“Okay,” Char says again, when they've all gathered around. “I was also concerned that the wraith you decided at the last minute not to murder might have some kind of motive to make sure you didn’t end up changing your mind, so Kevin and I’ve been running some translations.”

Kevin spins his laptop screen around. Dean’s not sure why, because it’s filled with way too much text for them to glance at in approval. “I don’t trust these translations as a primary source, but everything we’ve found lines up with the ritual the coroner gave Dean.”

“How many sources?” Sam asks.

“Two,” Charlie says. “Or one and a half. But they’re from the Men of Letters library.”

“I don’t like this,” Sam says.

“None of us like this,” Benny says.

Dean laughs. “You think I do?”

Sam lets out a long breath, like maybe he’d wondered, like maybe he’s thinking of Dean benching him while Sam readjusted after the trials, and that’s - that might be something they should talk about, if they were other people.

*

The most recent disappearances have been from The Frog Pond, so it’s a good place to start.

Dean puts on the tightest shirt in his duffel and a pair of jeans that hug his ass just right. It’s a ‘going out to get fucked’ outfit, but he sacrifices the definition from his shoulders to his waist for a dark green button-up overtop so he can keep his gun on him.

“I don’t like this either,” Benny says, quiet but firm as he sits on his bed and watches Dean take an extra minute or two on his hair.

“Your new mattress so great that you’re too good for motel rooms now?” Dean asks, deliberately obtuse, and Benny rolls his eyes. “I’m not worried,” Dean tells the gel in his hands, tells Benny’s reflection. “You know why?” he asks, turning around.

“I’m going to mark it up to that fumble-fingered grip on sanity you’ve always had,” Benny says.

“Because I’ve got you backing me up,” Dean says, wiping his hands on his pants. “I’ve got you, and I’ve got Sam, and I’ve got Charlie, and I’ve got Kevin.”

Benny swallows, audible. “Okay,” he says.

“Come on,” Dean says, and holds out his hand to pull Benny up off the bed. He lets Benny hugs him, or he pulls Benny into a hug. He’s honestly not sure which. He gets that Benny hates this. He does. If the tables were turned, Dean wouldn't be any too fond of it either. "You got me?" he asks Benny's shoulder.

"Yeah, I got you," Benny says, and follows him out to the car.

Sam’s waiting outside at the car, shivering a little against a none-too-cold breeze. Dean tries to keep his face straight. “Um,” Benny says.

“Nice shirt,” Dean offers, literally biting his lip, but apparently Kevin and Charlie have wandered up behind them, because as soon as Charlie starts laughing, Dean loses it.

“What?” Sam asks.

“That’s, uh, quite a look you have there,” Benny offers.

Sam scowls. “I’m not taking fashion advice from a centenarian in suspenders.”

“Have - have you ever been to a gay bar?” Kevin asks.

“You are _not even old enough to drink_ ,” Sam says.

“Uh-huh,” Dean says, and starts laughing, because Sam’s angrily crossed arms are fucking hilarious against the backdrop of the shiny mesh shirt. It glitters very prettily in the parking lot floodlights as he stomps off to change.

“Better,” Dean says when Sam is back, because Sam apparently picked out the advice Dean had yelled between laughs, which was basically ‘dress like you normally do, but NICER.’

Charlie pats Sam’s arm. “You looked very pretty,” she says. “Look, it’s not like there won’t be anyone there dressed like that, but you were very clearly uncomfortable with your nipples out, and we’re trying to blend in.”

“Easier to get a weapon in, too,” Dean offers, because he knows he cuts a better line without the open button-down but he wanted a gun and a switchblade, damn it. His trust doesn’t extend to being stupid for no damn reason.

There’s a slowly dawning look of horror on Kevin’s face. “Sam,” he says. “Where were you hiding your gun?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Sam says, tossing his keys in Charlie’s general direction and slouching into the front seat of the Impala.

*

“Dean,” Sam says. They’re sitting in the Impala on a street lit by flickering pools of yellow light, down the street from the brighter pulse of lights outside the club. “Do you really think we have enough to risk your life?”

“I’m a big boy, Sammy,” Dean says. “I can look after myself." The windows of the car are up, but he can feel the pulse of the bass in his teeth, just a little. “I think we have enough information that we shouldn’t be risking anyone else’s.”

Sam takes a long, deep breath. Dean knows his brother is thinking about Dean benching him. About Isip, about every time Dean’s offered himself up as bait. He knows Sam well enough to know all this, but not how to talk to him about it, or even if they should. If they were different people, they probably would, probably should.

“Besides,” Dean says. He thinks about Famine, thinks of his shaking hands and the parched drought of Famine’s breath as he said _you’re empty, you’re already dead_. “Even odds that if a horseman of the freaking apocalypse couldn’t pull some kind of need out of me, a hungry ghost is going to pass me right by.”

In a lot of the lore, preta are harmless. Creatures of pity. Things stuck wanting something they shouldn't so bad it destroys them, things with eyes too large and mouths too small and stomachs that barely exist but can never be filled. 

"Do you think -" Dean asks. Looks over and sees that Sam is distractedly counting the bullets in his gun. "Hey," he says.

Sam rolls his eyes so hard Dean worries his head is going to bobblehead right off his neck. "I'm sorry, were we doing this again?"

“Hey,” Dean says again, affronted. 

“I’m worried about you using yourself as bait,” Sam says. “Because - look, you worry I was ready to die. I'm worried you always jump so easily to handing yourself over to something for lunch. I’m not worried that you’re an empty, shallow husk of a man.” He takes a deep breath. “Look, if you were after sympathy you’d be having this conversation with Benny,” Sam says. “Maybe Charlie. You _want_ , Dean, and that’s - that’s okay." He looks like he wants to reach out and touch Dean, or something, but instead he just takes a deep breath before he speaks. "Here: first thing that pops into your head. What do you want right now?”

“To catch the son of a bitch that did this,” Dean says without thinking. Huh.

In the passenger seat, Sam grins, pushes his magazine back into place. “Okay. Let’s go.”

*

The music is loud, thrumming, gets in Dean’s bones. It rattles his ribcage in a way he likes and cuts off his hearing in a way he hates, like a muffled blanket thrown around his head. He sees Sam’s head above the crowd as he moves across the dancefloor, Kevin’s dark hair bobbing along in his wake. Dean’s finishing his second pass around the outskirts of the club, a slow, deceptively casual circuit that finds him snagged up against the press of strangers where space is tight, a crush of cologne and sweat and bodies that always parts eventually.

There’s a hand on his elbow, familiar, not teasing. “Hey,” Charlie yells, and he bends down till her mouth is near his ear. “Nothing on the top floor. I’m going to check out the women’s.”

“Okay,” Dean says. “Do you want -”

“It’ll raise too much suspicion if I bring a man back to the bathroom here,” she says, and, well, point. “I’ll text.”

“Okay,” Dean says, and she lets go of his elbow as she leaves. Dean checks his watch. They’ve been here for almost an hour now, which means phase one is over, and phase two --

Dean eases his way up to the bar, tilting his head in faux sheepishness when the bartender does a double-take, clearly recognizing him from his questioning of the staff a few days before.

“Thomas, right?” Dean asks, leaning across the bar toward the other man.

“I don’t have anything else to tell you,” Thomas says.

Dean gestures towards the whiskey behind the bar. “Not here for work,” he says.

Thomas gives Dean and easy up and down and his lips part a little “Really,” he says, leaning in closer.

There’s a hand on Dean’s back then, familiar. Benny crowds up against Dean, hand slipping along the small of Dean’s back to his hip, one finger snagging in Dean’s belt loops. “Any luck yet?” he whispers against the shell of Dean’s ear, and Dean fights back the shiver that races through him. For one thing, with the music at this volume, it’s a shout, not a whisper. For another, this is phase two. Two of the confirmed victims were out with someone when they disappeared; one of the suspected victims was out with his fiancee when he disappeared, and she swears she only looked away for a minute; a bit of more pointedly asking around this afternoon had led them to find out that Ryan had looked like he was on the verge of going home with someone before Ryan had vanished and the other man had left alone. 

“Nothing yet,” he says into Benny’s ear, Benny tucking his face into the base of Dean’s neck as Dean turns in close to him. Benny’s beard prickles at Dean’s neck, can be felt through the collar of Dean’s t-shirt, sensation cutting off at the collar of his button-up, a layer too much to penetrate.

The bartender puts two whiskeys down in front of Dean. Dean tilts the first easily back, not because Benny's wrapped around him but because the tox reports on the victims had shown inebriation. The little lore they have says you have to be in a certain state of mind to see a preta for what it is, or maybe it says that you have to be in a certain state of mind for it to see you. Alcohol takes your inhibitions down, Dean knows, leaning into the press of Benny’s arm where it wraps around the back of Dean’s rib cage.

Then again, maybe the intoxication is a coincidence. Maybe the alcohol is a side effect of the location, an uncorrelated variable, has nothing to do with anything other than that the victims had all been out at the time. Plus there’s a 48-hour window for a body to be recovered for a tox screen, for blood alcohol content to be effective, and it’s not exactly like they have a large sample size. Too many variables, Dean knows, so replicating what they know as best they can is the best bet. Alcohol doesn't ward off a preta and might even be needed to see one, so he lets the whiskey burn down his throat, breath drawn after it full of sandalwood and the sharp-smooth smell of Benny’s too-close skin, smoke and the scent of too-sweet alcohol following after.

The bartender is looking at him, looking at them. Dean pushes the second glass into Benny’s free hand, fingers brushing as Benny takes it. Benny draws his head back from Dean’s neck, club air that rushes in to replace his touch hot in comparison. He drinks slowly, throat working as he stays close, so close to Dean. Benny’s eyes flash bright and dark, clear blue cast ocean dark, cast green, cast purple-black in the strobing lights. Dean reaches up to take the glass from him and their fingers tangle around it as they place it back to the bar together before they disengage. The bartender is looking at Dean. There’s a drop of whiskey left glittering on the bow of Benny’s lip, and Dean reaches up to wipe it away with his thumb like there’s no way his body could make any other choice.

Benny’s lips part at Dean’s touch dragging across them, like they’re trying to keep the contact. His cool breath ghosts against the pad of Dean’s thumb as it skates from the plush middle of his lower lip to catch at the corner of his mouth. Dean’s thumb feels wet with the whiskey, and he pulls his hand back and sucks the thumb into his own mouth, chasing the slight burn of alcohol because he’s suddenly parched. Benny’s eyes aren’t flashing colors anymore, pupils blown so wide they swallow his irises. Dean’s heart beats so loudly he thinks he can feel it over the thrumming bass. His mouth is dry. He can feel everywhere he and Benny are touching. Hip, thigh. His ribs expanding into Benny’s arm as he breathes. Benny’s hand on his hip, looped through his belt loops, has shifted slightly so that his thumb is under the hem of Dean’s tee, stroking softly back and forth against the skin that covers his hip. More than that, though, Dean can feel everywhere they’re not touching, everywhere they could be touching. Dean’s hand still near his mouth, thumb slick with his own saliva, the vulnerable skin of his inner wrist turned so close to Benny that he can feel the gusts of Benny’s breath against it, faster than before. 

Benny looks at Dean with dark, dark eyes and slowly, deliberately turns his head so that his lips hover above his wrist. Dean thinks of the veins that run there, blue-green beneath his skin, wonders if Benny can see the way his skin flutters with his pulse. Benny slowly, deliberately, places a soft kiss there, lips dry. Another at the base of Dean’s thumb. Another, two, where Dean’s radius and ulna rest against his scaphoid, his lunate. Benny’s beard leaves an afterimage on the fine skin there. Dean’s heart beats faster, harder. He thinks Benny can probably feel the change in his pulse against the sensitive skin of his lips. Benny draws back, but barely, just enough that his lips leave his skin. Dean’s hand follows, finding Benny’s jaw as Benny looks up at him. They’re touching in more places than they aren’t now, facing each other almost head-on, thigh to thigh. Dean’s thumb, still ever so slightly wet, ghosts against the bare skin of Benny’s cheekbone, rests at the corner of his brow.

Dean’s lips are dry and he licks them, automatically. Benny’s face is all Dean can see, his dark-blown eyes, the way his hair and beard flicker burnished bright and then swallow the light. The alternating patterns of shadow and light, the high flickering contrast make it feel a little like Purgatory, leaves rustling overhead and disrupting the light. Dean’s focus pared down to one thing, one pure thing. But Dean can smell Benny, smell sandalwood and soap and the sharp _something_ that lies underneath it that makes Dean want to do anything but run. And Dean - Dean doesn’t feel like some _thing_ pared down to nothing but arrow-carved bones that fly to their target. Benny’s close enough that their noses almost touch, breath mingling. Dean - Dean _wants_. He wants to know what Benny tastes like, under the whiskey. He wants and he thirsts and he hungers, god, he _hungers_. Dean’s hand is still against Benny’s face and his fingers flex without his permission. Benny turns his face from Dean’s but it’s only to press into his hand, press a deliberate kiss to the center of Dean’s palm.

“Dean?” Benny asks, voice low, serious, syllable drawn out.

 _Yeah_ , Dean nods, mouth dry, leaning in. Benny’s dark-blown eyes drift shut. Dean’s breath catches in his chest, and they’re pressed close enough that he thinks Benny must be able to feel it, and --

And then someone jostles into them, and the second Benny’s thumb leaves the bare skin of Dean’s hip the rest of the world comes crashing back in. The techno-synth pounding of the music reacquires distinct beats and rhythms. Dean can feel the other people pressed in around them, smell smoke and too many bodes. Dean takes a sharp, almost accidental step back, step away, and his hand comes away from Benny’s face so fast it almost feels like a slap. Benny’s arm unwinds from around him. Dean’s eyes close for what he swears is only a second, and when he opens them again Benny is gone.

Dean finds himself suddenly grateful for the press of the bar against his side as he lists, just a little.

“You okay?” the bartender asks. Yells.

“Yeah,” Dean says, gulping the whiskey the man hands him, a quick, smooth burn gone so fast it barely has time to wet his tongue. “I just need some air,” he says, because the room is hot, so hot, smells wrong in a roiling way now that it’s too many colognes and perfumes and exhausted bodies instead of Benny’s soap. “I just need some air,” he repeats, stumbling out into the night.

The night air is a slap against Dean’s face in the best possible way. It settles, cool and humid, across his overheated skin like a blanket. _This, Sam,_ Dean thinks wildly, _this is why I can’t want things_ , because they’re on a case. They’re here on a case, and he forgot about Ryan, about Parisa, about the other bodies in the river. And this - this is the kind of thing John would have Dean’s hide for, and Dean thinks maybe he’d be right, and he closes his eyes and rests his head against the brick of the alley wall and breathes. He can smell the river, close. The dumpster, closer. The dusty, wet wood smell of pallets. Pavement and gasoline and something metallic.

The thing about wanting something, Dean thinks, even in a peripheral, sideways way, even if you don’t let yourself look at it straight on, is that you stop just accepting what you have. You’re aware when you don’t get it. What fucking point is there in wanting things you can’t have, anyway?

What would he even want, Dean thinks, if he was someone else? He can barely articulate what he wants. He’s not sure if it’s an easier or harder question, what some other him would want, some version of him that knows less well what the inside of someone looks like, who can’t close his eyes and feel how the impact of a head coming off resonates through your body. The metallic smell in the alley sharpens, fills his nose and mouth like blood.

Would he have been like Ryan, Dean wonders. Shitty car and a small circle of friends and big questions about viruses too small to see? Would he have ended up in the river with his lungs and belly full of water, because there’s a difference between a world where nothing goes bump in the night and a world where you don’t know about the things that go bump.

There’s a world, probably, where Dean shows up with one bruise too many and Bobby runs John off when he shows up to pick them up. Where he’s a child of divorce, because Mary lives, where she reluctantly or eagerly teaches him to shoot a gun, a world where he and Sam and Mary keep Lawrence safe, another where she and Dean had a screaming fight before he headed out on the road with a trunk of salt and silver bullets. Where they had that screaming fight before _she_ pulled out on the road with a trunk of salt and silver bullets.

Dean’s thirsty. He misses it, now, how he’d trained himself out of hunger, learned to ignore thirst, set his body to run on scattered and snatched slivers of sleep. Eyes still closed, he twists so that the back of his head is against the brick, mouth open to the humid, metallic air like he can drink the night itself. The music spilling from the club seems suddenly louder, more discordant.

He’s so fucking thirsty. He feels like he’s been wrung dry. Beneath the humidity and metal of the air, Dean can still taste the whiskey in his mouth. He wonders, sharply, intently, what Benny’s mouth would have tasted like, beneath the lingering burn of alcohol. If it would have been a clash of teeth and lips, desperate and sharp and hungry. If he would have kissed Dean’s mouth as softly and sweetly as he had this palm, his wrist, as they drank each other in.

Dean tries to picture it, and it comes so vividly he can almost feel it, hand cupping against his neck, Benny’s skin so hot it’s almost burning. Dean’s mouth opens, and he’s not sure if it’s opening for an imagined kiss or for water in the metallic air, or --

It’s the warmth of the hand at Dean’s neck that tells him something is wrong, that something is very wrong, and when he opens his eyes he sees double. It’s like when you try to focus on something too close to your face.

There’s a figure close to Dean’s face. It’s Thomas, it’s the bartender, but it’s also someone else, something else. It’s a double image, carefully styled red hair that shifts sideways into a distorted, knotted mess that refuses to entirely obey gravity. Sharp, handsome cheekbones and lean musculature that are also nothing but grayed skin pulled taut across sharp bones. Dean’s limbs are frozen. The metallic smell of the alley comes into focus, and Dean can feel the blood running down his neck as the thing leans down to lap at it, making a distressed and defeated noise of hunger. Its head comes up, lips wet with blood and keening with denied want. Dean looks into its eyes and he knows, he understands the hollow hunger that lives there, this creature nothing more than skin stretched over gaping need, sinew and hollow cheekbones and xylophone ribs. Distantly, floating, he wonders what it was that this monster, this thing that used to be a man, hungered for so much in life that turned him into this gasping, grasping revenant.

It licks its red lips, like that’s going to be the thing that quenches its thirst, and Dean thinks of that bead of whiskey on Benny’s lips and he’s just as parched, just as hungry as the preta. Dean's limbs are still heavy, his body a cumbersome thing that fights against him. Dean tries to talk himself back into the lighter, pared-down thing that he was in Purgatory, the thing that crawled out of Hell, the thing that Famine laughed at, but it makes his limbs feel heavier, more trapped, head sagging back against the wall and feeling the vibration of the club’s bass. 

Instead, he thinks finally, desperately, even though all his life has been leading here, that he wants to walk out of this alley. That he wants a burger and a quiet movie night and for Charlie to kick his ass for how this is all going down. Hell, he even wants Sam make awkward faces at him and try to engage him in prickly conversation about feelings in the Impala, like Dean doesn’t know exactly what he’s doing by waiting until they’re in the car; Dean wants to stand a foot and a half from Cas under a streetlight, wants to push through the awkwardness about Benny. Wants to push through the awkwardness _with_ Benny, his preta-drugged lips pressed so soft to the inside of Dean’s wrist, while Benny struggles, gentlemanly, to pretend he doesn’t know Dean was already there ages before some hungry ghost fucked with their heads.

He wants something more than to live, Dean thinks, he wants to have a _life_ and he slams his head forward into the preta’s. The preta’s head snaps back, more than seems possible on the human superimposition, the narrow, wobbling neck of its true form whipping and swaying impossibly.

Something in the air shifts, vibrates, and Dean surges forward, trying to carry it to the ground. The preta sways, scuttles, and Dean, still foggy-headed and distant-limbed, stumbles past. He gets in a good kick, elbow to the forehead, but the thing whips back past around him, scrambles on his back, impossibly heavy. The preta’s neck snakes across Dean’s shoulder to lick again at the blood dripping down Dean’s neck again, only this time he can feel that it’s bleeding something other than just red out of him, a low pull somewhere in Dean’s chest telling him it’s not his blood the preta is drinking now.

Something hits them from the side, hard. Dean and the preta go crashing to the concrete, skidding on the damp pavement. It’s Sam, rolling off of them and coming quickly up into a crouch as his movement rockets him past. It’s been less than a minute since Dean opened his eyes to the double vision of the bartender in front of him, Dean realizes. The increasingly loud thrum of the music must have come from Sam opening the door into the alley.

Dean shakes his head and rolls his shoulder hard and the preta goes tumbling off his back. It catches itself against the alley wall, all four limbs pressed to the brick and hair floating at all angles like gravity is a suggestion, before it bares its bloody teeth and lets out an unearthly but incredibly human howl, launching itself back at Dean. Sam intercepts it in midair, crashing into a dumpster.

“Dean!” Charlie yells, and Dean turns his head to see that the others are there too, Charlie chalking a circle and elongated symbols around a knife, Kevin reading from a book, and Benny chanting something over a ball of rice.

The preta, scuttling, crab-walking in a way that breaks something in Dean’s brain where the image of the bartender lays over it, tries to make a break for Dean again, unerring. The preta’s not on him anymore, but Dean’s bleeding and he feels like he’s leaking something else as well, and knows somehow that as long as that thing is breathing, it’s going to keep unwinding that something out of Dean, reeling it from Dean and into himself.

“Dean!” Kevin yells, Charlie snatching the rice from Benny’s hands and darting towards Dean. Her shoulder crashes against Dean’s as they cross paths, Charlie breaking for Sam and the preta and Dean reaching for the circle, the knife. Dean smacks a hand to his kneck and it comes away red, slaps his hand along the blade and it glows red, then white, as Kevin finishes reading. Dean snatches it up, turns around to see Sam tackle the preta again, Charlie cramming the rice, the burnt and salted offering, into its snapping jaws.

The preta swallows, rice moving visibly down the narrow throat, and it looks - surprised or satisfied or something, gasping at food that actually enters its body. Dean staggers over, dagger clutched in his bloody palm. He straddles it as Sam pins it. “Eat this,” Dean says, driving the knife home through washboard ribs.

The preta shudders, gasps, convulses hard enough to raise its torso from the cold alley. As it dies, its hair floats upward and its wide-open mouth releases wisps that are at once silver-blue lights and red-orange smoke.

The body beneath Dean is suddenly only the bartender again, but it’s both more and less than human. This is not a man recently dead. Grayed skin stretches taut against impossibly hollow cheeks. Dean stays there, straddling him. He wonders if the person the preta was _before_ was a lot like him or if he was like Ryan or if he was his own entire person, unlike any of them.

“You okay?” Sam asks, standing in front of Dean, backlit in the orange lights.

“Always,” Dean says, and offers Sam his hand to pull him up. There’s a headrush as he stands and he locks his knees against it.

“Uh-huh,” Sam says.

“Lick,” Charlie says, offering her palm to Benny.

“Gross,” Dean says when Benny does so without question, and “what the hell,” when Charlie moves her hand toward Dean’s neck. He starts to bat her away, but she easily smacks his hand down, which is probably a sign of something. She crowds Dean up against the alley wall again and presses her wet palm to his bleeding neck.

She rolls her eyes. “Vampire saliva speeds wound healing. Anticoagulant is in the teeth.”

“Guess you don’t want your leftovers bleeding out before you have a chance to finish them,” Dean rasps. He’s been cut before, he’s bled before, and he knows that the amount he’s lost has nothing to do with how he’s feeling right now, but -- “thanks,” he tells Charlie, still with her hand against his neck. Nods at Benny, which makes Charlie bring up her other hand to hold his chin in place so he doesn’t disturb the wound.

Benny nods in response and his face is - he keeps looking towards Dean and away, a constant loop that Dean sees because he’s staring across the alley at him, steady. Sam’s looking at Dean in concern.

“You thirsty?” Sam asks.

“Parched,” Dean says, because Charlie has taken her hand away and nodded in approval.

Kevin tosses a bottle of water at Dean and he chugs it in one go, crumpling it in his hand and dropping it.

“More?” Dean asks, because if anything his mouth feels drier than before, and Sam makes a constipated face. “Right,” Dean says, thinking of the bodies in the river, stomachs full of water. He scrubs his sleeve at his neck to wipe away the blood.

“How are you feeling?” Sam asks again. “Do you - do you feel any desire to go night swimming?”

“No,” Dean says. “No, Sammy, I don’t feel the urge to walk into the river.” He’s tired. He’s thirsty. He wants -- “I --” He starts to say ‘I’m fine,’ and it is with surprise that he finds himself saying “I want to go home,” instead.

“Yeah, of course,” Sam says. He’s crossing the arms of the body over each other, rolling it small for transport.

“We can deal with this,” Kevin says, gesturing broadly to the alley, to the body and the blood and the security cameras Dean didn’t notice before but should have been a big tip-off it was an inside job. He hopes the cameras are automated, because Charlie can hack any system but not a human brain.

Charlie digs around in Dean’s pockets and tosses his keys to Benny.

“Let’s get you home,” Benny says.

Dean wants to protest - that he’s fine, that he’s more than fine to burn a body and spend another night on a hotel bed - but he’s tired, he’s thirsty, he’s burning up, and the river sounds a bit more tempting than he’d let on. And he’s not - he’s not just abandoning Sam to deal with this by himself while Dean inevitably conks out in the back seat of the car half-way back to Lebanon when the exhaustion overtakes him.

“Okay,” Dean says, and lets Charlie walk them to the car.

“What are you going to tell Parisa?” Dean asks, leaning against the side of the Impala as she stands on the sidewalk under a streetlight and Benny digs around in the trunk.

Charlie crosses her arms tightly. Shifts on her feet. “The truth, I think,” she says, finally. “I think - I think she’d want to know that we got it.”

Dean wants to say something about minimizing risk and exposure, but the truth of the matter is that Ryan had nothing to do with this, with any of this, and he still got dead because of it. Dean thinks, almost-drugged, about the kind of life he might have had if Mary hadn’t died, about the various kinds of lives he might have had. There’s a difference between a world where nothing goes bump in the night and a world where you don’t know what the sound is.

“Okay,” he says. “Let me know if you want backup.”

Benny settles a full can of gas down on the concrete beside her. “If you want proof,” he offers, teeth flashing and retracting for the barest of seconds.

“I’ll let you know,” she says.

Dean opens his arms and raises an eyebrow, and she steps into them, hugging him more carefully than she needs to because really, it was his - soul or life force or whatever - that took the hit. His body is fine.

“Hey,” Dean says, and “I love you,” to the crook of her neck. She must know how significant it is that he’s the one who says it first, because her arms tighten reflexively around him.

“I know,” she says, kissing his cheek and dodging out of his arms before he has a chance to rub his knuckles against her head in a noogie. She grabs the gasoline can and strides back to the alley, her back straight.

“Come on,” Dean says. “Let’s go home.”

*

Benny drives a careful 10 above the speed limit, eyes mostly on the road, lit in alternating strips of blue and orange as headlights of different eras, different ages sweep into the car before fading away again, halogens of cities rise and fall. Dean sleeps, or drifts, or something, in the front seat, lulled by the familiar growl of the engine. In a dreamy, half-gone way he thinks about Lawrence, about fire, about water closing overhead. There are a carefully allotted number of water bottles in the front seat with them. Whenever he wakes, he drains another before dropping it to the floor. Empty plastic bottles litter the floorboards around his feet, and he knows, distantly, that would normally infuriate him.

 _Water intoxication_ , Sam had said, basically reminding him that too much water would kill you, as Kevin counted out a precise number of bottles. What was it like, to live a life where too much was what would kill you?

What could it be like?

Sometimes, when Dean is half-awake, he can feel the heavy weight of Benny’s gaze against him. Dean can feel the alley, cold brick against his back and the hot hand of the preta against his neck, feel the spill of never-could-bes that tripped through his head.

He stretches, shifts slightly like he’s still asleep, knee sliding on the seat so that it almost brushes against Benny’s. Benny huffs out a laugh, unfooled, but his hand drops softly to Dean’s knee. Dean closes his eyes for real.

“Don’t hold it against me,” Dean says, later, eyes closed and flushed forehead tipped to the cool glass of the window. Transient headlights paint the insides of his eyelids soft red before fading to black. It’s not the kind of thing he could say wide-awake. It’s not fair of him to ask. He’s not sure what he means - the way he dragged his thumb across Benny’s lip in the club or taking Benny’s head off or Sam dragging him back or the way Dean’s heart thumps and his pulse quickens sometimes when he looks at Benny or just - all of it. It’s not fair of him to ask.

“Never, cheri,” Benny says. His hand is still on Dean’s knee, grounding.

*

Dean spends a long time in the shower, turning his already-overheated face to the spray and letting it run across the ridge of his brow and the bridge of his nose and into his mouth. The thirst is an echo, an after-image, a mere shadow of the type of need he’s spent most of his life training his body to ignore. There’s still something sweet about the spray of the hot water, the fresh-metal undertaste of it.

There’s still water in his hair, small damp hollows of skin where his soft-worn t-shirt and boxers and sweats stick to him when he steps out of the shower room. Benny’s leaning against the hallway wall. He’s trying for casual, settled against the brick, arms and one leg crossed, eyes closed.

“Really?” Dean asks, toweling his hair. He’s not some wilting daisy, he's not -- but he gets it, they’re not sure what the side-effects are. How long it takes you to grow back whatever you lost. If it were Sam in front of him, Dean’d probably shrug him off. If it was Sam that got whammied, Dean’d probably be watching him sleep to check his breathing, like he did when they were young. Benny’s not judging, he’s just - there.

Benny shrugs. “If anyone could find a way to drown themselves in the shower, it’s you.”

Dean snorts. “Sam would never forgive you if you let that happen.”

“Boy’d short-sheet my bed until the end of time,” Benny agrees, falling in beside Dean as they walk. His voice is mild in a way that his eyes betray.

*

Dean stares up at the ceiling, room a nearly impenetrable mass of shadows lit only by the glow of his clock and the narrow copper rectangle around the edge of his door. There’s no shadow moving past it or anything, but --

“You creeping outside my door?” Dean asks, voice pitched low.

“Like I ain’t got better things to do than listen to you snore,” Benny’s voice comes.

Dean is only regular thirsty. Doesn’t feel the need to get up and dangle his feet in the nearest body of water. He rolls upright. He’s weirdly aware of the cold linoleum beneath his bare feet, the way each of his toes grasp against it. He gets up and opens his door. Benny is sitting in the hall, one leg stretched in front of him, other drawn up with his arm draped across it. His back is propped against the wall and he looks for all the world like he’s settling in for the long haul.

Dean thinks about what Sam said when he showed up out of Purgatory with Benny’s soul nestled in his arm. _He wasn’t planning on coming back._ Dean thinks about what it would have been like to watch Benny’s back disappear into the trees, fading out into sepia and the high-contrast landscape until he was a part of it. Wonders if maybe, Benny would have felt any amount of that watching Dean walk into the river, water wicking up his jeans, face cast in deep shadows in the city lights reflecting off the dark water.

“I can’t leave an old man sitting on the ground all night,” Dean says. He offers Benny his hand. Benny looks almost surprised but he takes it and lets Dean haul him to his feet. “If you’re going to pull a freaking Edward Cullen on me all night, you might as well be comfortable,” he says. Benny follows Dean into Dean’s room. He lingers in the doorway, gaze following Dean like he can’t take his eyes off him.

Dean thinks about how his eyes had kept drifting to Benny in the back seat on the way back from his resurrection, how he hadn’t wanted to let him out of his sight, the fear he hadn’t wanted to admit was thrumming through him as room after room of the bunker turned up empty, until he found Benny standing out in the long grass. Dean’s tired though, he’s so fucking tired. He feels the weight of lives he never got a chance to live and the lives he could have chosen to, and really he just wants to sleep. And-

He doesn’t want to be alone, he really doesn’t, but he doesn’t know how to say it, so he just pulls the covers over his head. “Take off your freaking shoes,” Dean grumbles into his pillow. He doesn’t move as he feels the mattress beside him settle. He has half a moment to worry if he’s ruined everything, because there’s no way Benny doesn’t know now, but it’s only half a moment before the darkness takes him.

*

Dean’s dreams aren’t soft, exactly, but they’re painted in strokes too broad for sharp edges to form. He says yes to Michael and the world ends. He’s sixteen, seventeen, driving the Impala down a desert highway, tasting dust and clay, fingers on the wheel drumming along with the radio as Sam grins and reads out facts from an almanac. He’s fifteen and the werewolf he’s bait for aims an inch higher and Dean bleeds out alone. He’s older and younger, on a hunt, on another hunt, trails of breadcrumbs followed another way that lead to people he could have loved who he never got a chance to meet. He’s thirteen, Sam playing in the backyard, and Mary is showing him how to carefully repaint the devil’s traps at the doors and windows of the house. He’s twenty-something and Dad is missing but he listens to the hunger gnawing at him instead of ignoring it, so he stops for a bite at some out-of-the-way shithole called The Roadhouse, and so Sam stays at Stanford while Dean and Jo cover the country in wandering, crisscrossing lines. He’s twenty-something and nothing goes bump in the night and he’s on vacation from the auto shop or he’s on summer break from college, and he wanders into a Cajun restaurant, and Benny’s behind the counter and Dean sees him for the first time and his stomach pools warm with want.

Dean wakes up, feeling warm and comfortable and a relaxed _something_ that part of his brain almost wants to call safe, if that was something he was ever allowed to feel. He’s thirsty, but it’s only the normal kind of morning thirst. He feels the peculiar bleary clarity of too much sleep that doesn’t make up for days almost without. It’s been - it’s been what, only three days since Charlie got that first message from Parisa. It feels like so many more, even without the fact Dean was up for most of them.

Dean’s almost exactly where he fell asleep, but at some point in the night Benny has wrapped himself around Dean, pressed all along Dean’s back, and Dean didn’t even register it enough to wake. Benny's face is tucked into Dean’s neck, cool breath ghosting against Dean’s jugular. He has one hand tucked into the crook of Dean’s elbow, the other resting against his wrist, fingers curled into the cup of Dean’s palm. Benny’s legs nudge against the back of Dean’s knees, ankles tangled. He’s brushed up against as many of Dean’s pulse points as possible, and Dean’s not sure if it’s an instinctive thing, as many points of contact as possible to make sure Dean’s heart is continuing slow and steady, or if it’s to ensure that Benny’s scent completely displaces the preta’s hands on Dean.

A selfish, greedy part of Dean wants to think it’s both. Without realizing he’s about to move, Dean slides the hand that Benny’s curls against, just a little, like maybe his hand has decided on its own to entwine their fingers.

His hand is stupid, because the movement wakes Benny, something Dean can tell because Benny’s weight goes from pliant to rigid in a heartbeat. “Sorry,” Benny murmurs, lips still close enough to Dean’s neck that they brush his skin like a kiss. It’s a small thing really, especially compared to everywhere else they’re touching, but it shoots through Dean like lightning. “Sorry,” Benny says again, farther away this time, disentangling from Dean. Dean wants to finish the motion to interlace their fingers, wants to pull him back, wants to pull him closer, wants to put Benny’s mouth at his neck, his jaw, his mouth. But Benny’s disentangling and Dean lets him go, because apparently that’s what Benny wants. He doesn’t go far, just enough to turn on the bedside light, to sit up against the headboard as the dim golden glow paints soft across their features. The short space between them on the mattress is cast in valleys of shadows and light, a gaping chasm that Dean doesn’t know how to cross.

Dean thinks of that photo of himself on Benny’s phone at Loveland Pass, the way the earth fell away before his feet. He thinks about Bobby feeding the photo of all of them, of him and Sam and Ellen and Jo into the fire, and he thinks - it was a hunter’s funeral in the absence of bodies, but he wishes, sometimes, that he had that picture.

“Sorry,” Benny says again, looking at his hands crossed on his lap, like he’s afraid they’re going to do something unforgivable without his permission, and Dean snorts loudly. Benny’s brows lower. “Beg pardon?”

Dean laughs again, a little bitter. He pushes himself up so that he’s sitting against the headboard beside Benny. “Don’t worry about it,” he says, trying for as dismissive of an apology as he’s trying to make of his body. “Besides,” he says, surprisingly honest, “makes me feel a little less bad about all the times I’ve used you as a pillow or a teddy bear.”

Benny laughs at that, but it’s not exactly a noise Dean likes.

“What?” he asks. Bristles. “If that was a problem, you should have --”

Benny shakes his head, calmer, but there’s still something in his eyes that Dean doesn’t know how to decipher. His smile is rueful. “Believe me, cheri,” Benny says. “You in my bed is never going to be any kind of a problem, no matter what way you want to be there.”

Dean’s heart thumps uncomfortably in his chest. His hand comes up automatically to check his neck, to make sure the preta isn’t still -- “Why?” he asks, and “because why?” and its close cousin, “what.”

Benny blinks at him slowly. “Don’t play dumb, now. It doesn’t suit you.”

“I promise you, I am exactly as stupid as I sound,” Dean says. He reaches out slowly, carefully, and entwines his hand with one of Benny’s, checking. His heart is in his throat. “Because _why_?” he repeats.

Benny blinks at him, face close enough that Dean can see the blond tips of his eyelashes in the lamplight. His free hand comes to rest against Dean’s jaw, soft catch of Dean’s stubble sliding against his palm audible in the quiet of the room. “Because this,” Benny says, and he leans in to kiss Dean. It’s a gentle, quick thing, a dry press of lips to his, a butterfly touch gone before Dean has a chance to lean into it, before his lips have a chance to part.

Dean freezes for a second, just long enough for Benny to pull back, but Dean breathes, reaches out and snags him by his lapels and reels him sharply back in. It’s a longer kiss with harder edges but it’s still - it’s not innocent, but it’s soft, somehow, lips meeting, hesitant, parting, pulling back so they barely touch, dipping in again. Dean exhales. Titles his head to press his forehead against Benny’s.

“I didn’t think you’d want this,” Benny breathes.

Dean laughs. “Yeah, well,” he says. “You also thought it would be cool if I just killed you for real.”

Benny starts to withdraw a bit but Dean holds on. His hands, cupped around Benny’s neck, his collar, slide to the meat of his shoulders, and it’s only then that Dean realizes that Benny isn’t just pulling back to reposition himself or drag Dean to a better angle than both of them sitting sideways against the headboard. Benny closes his eyes and swallows, hard enough that Dean can see his throat work. They’re still less than a foot away from each other, but it feels like infinitely more. Dean thinks about plate tectonics. About Loveland Pass, about the way the ground falls away beneath you. He thinks about the landscape of Purgatory, and his hand tightens instinctively in the meat of Benny’s shoulder.

“Hey,” Benny says. Catches Dean’s hand, urges it from his shoulder and into his own. Dean’s fingers curl over the edge of Benny’s like this is some kind of cartoon, Benny’s thumb ghosting along Dean’s fingertips as he brings Dean’s hand to his lips. Kisses the scar on his second knuckle, kisses along the back of his hand, over the outer metacarpals where Dean can sometimes still feel the boxer’s fractures he’s never really been able to give time to heal. 

It’s all too much, suddenly. The way Benny’s fingers are so gentle over Dean’s hip, the way he’s kissing his hand like he’s some kind of freaking gentleman. The copper-tinged half-light of the bedside lamp and the tick of thick, warm air flowing through the vents. The heavy, intense way Benny’s looking at him, like he can see right into Dean’s soul, can see every bad decision Dean’s made and every highway mile Dean has built himself around. “I need a drink,” Dean says.

Benny’s hands don’t linger on Dean as he pulls away, or any romantic shit like that. He releases Dean easily, doesn’t let his fingers stay tangled with Dean’s as he retreats, as Dean scrambles awkwardly back off of his bed. Dean feels cold where Benny was touching him, like he’s lost some source of heat even though he knows – he knows – Benny’s body hovers not too far above room temperature, so it’s not like there’s some huge physical contrast.

“All right,” Benny says. He’s still sitting against Dean’s headboard like he has more times than Dean can count, except his face – his face has _something_ on it, but it’s nothing like Dean thinks it should be. Benny’s not angry, or pained, or frustrated. He looks – a little sad, and a little – Dean’s not sure.

Dean opens the door. He stops, half way out of it, his hand still on the knob. Benny’s still sitting on Dean’s bed. Dean is suddenly, blindingly sure that if he walks out of here right now, Benny’s going to be gone when he gets back, and even if Benny just gets up and walks out of this room alone, if Dean comes back with water he’s splashed on his face still glistening in his eyelashes and sees the door to Benny’s room closing behind him - this – this huge whatever, is going to be over or different, or –

Dean swallows. “You coming?” he asks.

By the way Benny’s posture unwinds, just a bit, jaw loosening and shoulders sliding back, Dean can tell it’s the right question.

*

Dean runs the tap in the kitchen, testing it for temperature. Some days the way the water in the tap in the Bunker goes ice cold feels more indulgent than the endless hot water in the showers. Most of the motels and hotels had water that would go cool at best. The kind of cold that felt like ice in a shower but lukewarm on the tongue. Dean finishes off one glass, two, water so cold it makes his teeth hurt. He fills his glass again, fills a second, and sets them carefully beside the sink while he turns off the tap and braces his hands against the counter.

One of the glasses disappears from his peripheral vision as Benny picks it up. Benny settles back against the edge of the table and Dean turns to face him, hands turned back to brace against the sink. They’re a normal distance apart, and Dean thinks, a little wildly, that they should be either closer together or farther away.

The glass Benny grabbed is the one Dean’d been drinking out of, but Dean has a phantom flash of Benny’s mouth on his and thinks it probably doesn’t make much difference at this point.

Dean watches Benny’s mouth on the glass, watches his throat as he swallows. Because he gets to. He should feel more awkward. It should be more of a monumental change. He’s never known someone for this long before kissing them. Hell, he’s never even kissed anyone he’s known for this long.

Benny rolls the glass slowly back and forth between his hands, looks like he’s weighing his words carefully. “We all good, brother?” he asks, finally.

“As long as you promise never to call me _brother_ again,” Dean says. “Choose your lane. You get to make out with me, or you get to call me brother.” 

Benny drinks. Dean presses the pads of his fingers against the cool, smooth metal of the sink, and tries to figure out if he misread this, if he pushed too far. Benny finishes his water, puts the empty glass carefully down on the table.

“Mon petit chou?” Benny asks. His mouth quirks. “Mon lapin? Mon doudou?”

“I hate cutesy crap like that,” Dean says, not even pretending like his heartbeat isn’t betraying the total lie.

Benny laughs. It’s not a huge laugh but it’s more than the words deserve. He leans into it, shaking his head. Dean finds himself watching the way Benny’s eyes crinkle, the way his shoulders move, the way his thighs strain against his slacks, and Dean instinctively tries to tamp down the burst of _want_ that tears through him.

He looks up in time to see Benny turning his head, just a little, like he’s hiding an instinctive flair of his nostrils when Dean’s hormones hit him, and he seems to realize at the same moment that Dean does that they don’t have to hide it anymore. “You!” Dean says, pointing at him. “I knew you could smell me, you dick!” Benny’s laugh deepens, and Dean laughs too, a nervous, effervescent thing that bubbles out of him, and he wants, and he _wants_ , and the next thing he knows Benny is on him.

Dean thinks Benny might actually _blur_ , his brain registering only the suggestion of movement before Dean finds himself sitting on the counter, Benny cradled in the splay of his legs. “Hi,” Dean says, a little goofily.

“Hello,” Benny says, grinning up at him. 

“Hey,” Dean says. “We’re alive.” 

Benny quirks his lips. “Well, for some values of-”

Dean curls his fingers in the collar of Benny’s shirt and _pulls_. “Let’s celebrate,” he says, lips brushing Benny’s as he speaks. Benny pushes through the final breath of space between them.

Benny’s mouth is cold from the water but it warms up quickly on Dean’s. Dean’s hands are still wet where they grasp at the back of Benny’s neck. Eventually, Dean pulls back, arching his back to stretch it from curling forward. He wraps his legs around Benny and tugs him closer even as Dean leans back to brace for support. Dean’s hand hits something solid and cool, and he only realizes what’s happening when the other glass of water crashes to the floor with a sharp, shattering retort and a spray of water and glass.

They both jump. “Shit,” Dean swears as Benny curses in French. Dean's hand stings, and there's a faint line of red on his thumb that he sucks into his mouth automatically. "Shit," Dean says again, pulling his thumb out to examine it. There's no glass, and it's the kind of sharp, shallow cut that heals almost immediately.

"You all right, cheri?" Benny asks. Dean doesn't smirk or point out that Benny doesn't look like he smells a burger or anything, like he didn't in the alley, watching his saliva close up the wound on Dean's neck. 

“Time for a change of scenery,” Benny offers.

And Dean, Dean kind of just wants to stick with the program, but he looks at the glass and the water on the floor and the fact that he’s barefoot, and – “Yeah, let’s take this show on the road,” Dean says, and tries to push Benny back so he can hop down off the counter.

Benny doesn’t move, instead pulls Dean’s legs tighter around his waist and freaking picks him up like he weighs nothing. “Wouldn’t want you to cut yourself, cheri,” Benny says, utterly serious but also with one hand cupping the curve of Dean's ass where it meets his thigh. 

“Ugggh,” Dean says, when Benny puts him down outside the kitchen. “It’s probably for the best. Sam would’ve been unbelievably pissy if you’d fucked me on the counter.”

Benny _growls_ and picks Dean back up again and heads for his room, which, mission accomplished without Dean having to stoop to _asking_ Benny to carry him.

“’We make _food_ here, Dean,’” Dean mimics. Benny puts him down and Dean knocks his door closed behind them. 

“Can we stop talking about your brother?” Benny asks. Strips off his wet socks. “Got other things I’d rather focus on.”

“Like?” Dean asks, fluttering his eyelashes.

“Like that fine, fine tuchus of Kevin’s,” Benny says, sardonic, laughs as Dean uses both hands to push him back onto his bed.

Dean follows close after, climbing onto the bed and over Benny. Benny’s hands settle on his ass, giving it a friendly squeeze. He pulls at Benny and Benny pulls at him, and too many limbs appear to be involved. It’s a confusing tangle and a sudden lift, and then they’re face to face, impossibly close. Dean’s arms are pressed against something hard, and he realizes with a disorienting swoop of the world that they aren’t lying down, they’re up against the headboard and Dean is straddling Benny’s lap, arms braced against the wall. His hands are curled at Dean’s hips.

Benny licks his lips. Dean leans in to kiss him, but one of Benny’s hands come up to rest against Dean’s chest, stopping him. The tips of his fingers curl into the hollow of Dean’s collarbone, palm flat against the rising beat of Dean’s heart. “I gotta ask,” Benny says. “You aren’t just doing this because you feel guilty, are you? Because you said you’d do better by me, or because I hauled your sorry ass out of purgatory that one time?” The worlds are mild but the hand on Dean’s hip tightens, the palm on his chest pressing closer to feel if there’s the stammer-step of a lie in the beat of his heart.

Dean laughs. He laughs hard enough that he leans back to settle on his heels, on Benny’s sturdy thighs beneath him. “If I let someone put their dick in me every time I felt guilty, I’d never get anything done,” he says.

Benny’s mouth curls, slow and warm. “You’d get everyone done, though,” he says.

“Shut up,” Dean says, and kisses the smirk off Benny’s face. He kisses him again, deeper, snags Benny’s bottom lip gently between his teeth as Dean pulls back again, just far enough that he can see the bottle-green ring of Benny’s irises as the clear blue soaks up the low gold lamplight. 

“Hey,” Dean says. “You aren’t - you know that if you don’t - if you don’t want this, if you don’t want me, this is still your home.”

Benny closes his eyes. His eyelashes are tipped with gold. Dean can see him swallow. “Yeah,” Benny says. “Yeah, I know.”

“Good,” Dean says. Softly kisses Benny's closed eyes. Says “I want this,” dragging his lips along the shell of Benny’s ear. “I want this,” he says, rocking his hips forward.

“I can see,” Benny says, growls, hand sliding from the small of Dean’s back to tease against the skin beneath the waistband of Dean’s sweats, press against the swell of his ass and encourage Dean to rock against him as he hardens. 

“And you,” Dean says. Rolls his hips. “You want-“

Benny groans. Grinds against Dean. “You really gotta ask?”

“You could smell me,” Dean says. Arm braced against the wall and forehead touching Benny’s, hovering close over him, Dean presses his palm against his swelling dick, letting out a single hiss before Benny’s free hand tangles with his and pulls him away.

Benny tilts his head up to kiss Dean’s neck. A soft nuzzle at first, then a nip, mouth open and wet. “There are all kinds of wanting,” Benny says. He bites the tendon that runs along Dean’s neck, nuzzles at the collar of Dean’s t-shirt as it stretches down over his shoulder.

Dean takes Benny’s hand and pins it to the headboard. “You left,” Dean says. He can feel Benny getting hard beneath him, and it’s - “You’re going to be just as big as I thought you were, aren’t you?”

Benny growls at that, hips rolling into him. The hand on Dean’s ass encourages him to move with him, the other stays pinned in Dean’s grasp. “End of the line, you said,” Benny says. His voice is mild and restrained, but his hips buck.

“So?” Dean asks, confused. He thinks about waking up chained to a radiator, waking up in Bobby’s panic room. He thinks about the alley where he took Benny’s head and another where Cas had him up against the wall, screaming his disappointment. It’s always complicated.

Beneath him, Benny stops. He stops completely. It’s a disconcertingly complete lack of movement, a stillness no human could ever hope to imitate.

“What?” Dean asks, and tries to figure out what he did wrong.

Benny breathes. His hand, caught in Dean’s, stays wound together but pulls away from the wall. The casual strength of it makes heat pool low in Dean's stomach despite the change of pace; there's no way that Dean could hold Benny pressed against the wall if Benny didn't want him to. Benny's other hand comes away from the small of Dean’s back, and he just - pets, almost, at Dean’s hip as Dean sits back on his heels and scowls. His thumb strokes, soft and steady, at the fine skin above his hip. Benny sits up to look Dean in the eye. Dean’s eyes dart away. “Dean,” Benny says, soft. Pulls Dean’s hand to his lips and kisses his knuckles, deliberately. “Dean,” he says again, “let me make this clear. You tell me no, I back off. You tell me stop, I stop.” Benny kisses his hand again, intently this time, like an apology.

 _It’s not like that,_ Dean wants to tell him. It’s more complicated. It’s always more complicated. 

“Okay, you giant fucking girl,” Dean says instead. “I get it.” But he’s smiling, can feel the corners of his eyes wrinkling in an unfamiliar way. Benny kisses his hand again, kisses the ridge of his knuckles, lower, mouths back along the seam of Dean’s fingers before laving them with his tongue, opening his mouth to suck two of Dean’s fingers in. He maintains steady eye contact with Dean as he works obscenely at the fingers in his mouth, swirling his tongue around them and sucking hard before releasing them with an obscene pop.

Dean growls, swooping down to kiss Benny. It’s nothing like the delicate wrist kisses of the club or the softer exploratory kisses of earlier. It’s a sharp-edged, needy thing, teeth and tongues and breath panting between open mouths, like they’re trying to crawl into each other’s skin. Dean’s fingers scrabble at the back of Benny’s shirt, leaning forward as Benny encourages Dean to let him take his weight. Dean’s tee is riding up under Benny’s hands, one splayed against his ribs, the other dipping just below the edge of his sweats. Benny pulls back just enough to kiss the cleft of Dean’s chin, grinning a little loopily up at him. Dean’s not sure why that does it, why that’s what melts some last layer of _something_ that’s been holding Dean back, but it is.

“Off,” Dean snaps, fingers clenching into Benny’s shirt enough to get a grip, scowling when he realizes just how many layers Benny is still wearing. Button-up, pants, suspenders.

Benny grins. “Be my guest,” he says, scooting down the bed so he’s sprawled out on his back, head propped up on a pillow so he can watch Dean’s face. There’s - there’s a thread of nerves there, and it calms something in Dean, seeing that this means as much to Benny as to him.

“Do you have any idea how many times I’ve thought about this?” Dean asks, staring hungrily at Benny laid out before him. His hands rest briefly at Benny’s knees, his shoulders, before coming to settle along the width of Benny’s torso, fingers ghosting over his floating ribs. “If you’re ticklish. What you sound like when you come. Where you smell the most like home.”

Dean looks at Benny, and Benny is staring at him, intent and focused and unblinking, slight silver sheen on his eyes reflecting something other than human. He licks his lips. “I’ve got some idea,” Benny says, voice a growl. 

Dean’s hands flex on his torso. Dean wants and he wants, and he wants. Benny runs his hands up Dean’s arm, catches the back of his neck. Pulls Dean in so their bodies slot together and kisses him, kisses him deep and thorough until Dean has to pull back to breathe, edges of his vision dancing with stars.

“I don’t want to fuck this up,” Dean tells the corner of Benny’s jaw. Benny arcs his head back, baring his neck. Dean takes the invitation, working his way down Benny’s jugular. Benny’s hand comes to rest on the back of his head, encouraging him, and Dean nips, laves, soothes. “You gotta-” Dean tells Benny’s clavicle, “tell me.” 

“You’re gonna fuck up,” Benny groans. Rolls his hips up into Dean, belying the words.

Dean feels something in him turn cold. He braces his hands on Benny’s chest and pushes back. There had to be a catch.

“Hey now,” Benny says. Reaches out, rests his hands on Dean’s thighs as Dean settles on heels, stopping him from going anywhere. “Hey,” Benny says again. His throat already looks untouched again. “Hey now,” Benny says. Fingers curling against Dean’s thighs. Looks like he’s weighing his words. “Chances are, you are going to fuck this up. So am I. And that’d be true, even if we were some softer, more human versions of ourselves. Trying is what’s important. It’s what we do in the after that matters.”

Benny’s hands run gentle along Dean’s thighs, like he’s calming a spooked animal. Dean looks down at him. He looks at him, and he wants, and he wants, and he -- 

“Okay,” Dean says.

“Okay?” Benny asks.

Dean nods. “Yeah,” he says, and “fuck perfect, anyway.”

Benny laughs and it vibrates up Dean’s thighs, spreading warm though him like it’s knocking something loose. Dean deliberately places his palms flat on Benny’s stomach, runs them up his broad chest. He pushes his hands out as he drags them up, thumbs catching against nipples pebbling beneath Benny’s shirt, before he slides his hands easily under Benny’s suspenders, pushing the suspenders down his arms and free. He brings his hands back to Benny’s stomach, moving down towards the button of his slacks, his dick, before he stops, going just low enough to untuck Benny’s button-up shirt. His fingers move slowly but steadily up, carefully undoing every button as Benny swears at him to hurry up.

“You said ‘be your guest,’” Dean points out. Benny budges up his shoulders enough for Dean to pull the shirt free, and he starts to carefully fold it, laughing when Benny finally breaks, wrenching the shirt free and tossing it somewhere into the depths of his room. Dean laughs again, a little joyously, and drags Benny’s undershirt quickly over his head before pushing him back to the mattress. The devil’s trap tattoo is well-healed, hair mostly grown back in. And, yeah, Benny’s as well-furred as he remembers from that tattoo parlor. He indulges himself because he can, and his chest hair is indeed enough to get a grip in so he does, tugging playfully.

“Hey now,” Benny says, but there’s no heat in it, and Dean moves his hand to tweak a nipple instead.

Benny arches up into it, just a little. “Sensitive,” Dean says, and “cool.” He leans down to kiss Benny again, thumb pressing against a nipple and drinking up the gasp of it. Dean pulls back, sitting beside Benny on the bed, and his hands go, finally, to the gray slacks Benny’s filling out so well. He starts to reach for the button but he stops, hands first going to rest at Benny’s hips, moving to frame the outline of an impressive cock. Dean runs his fingers across it from tip to root.

Benny swears. “Dean,” he says, and “please.”

“Since you asked nicely,” Dean says. Dodges the pillow Benny throws at his head and laughs. He slips the button of Benny’s pants, and his dick strains at the zipper, the dark blue underwear visible as the zipper parts. Dean pulls off Benny’s pants, his socks, moves back up to look at him, lying there in nothing but dark blue boxers. Dean curls his fingers in the elastic of the boxers and pulls. Benny’s dick springs free. It’s heavy and thick and Dean’s mouth waters.

“Is this for me?” Dean asks, and Benny covers his face and groans at the joke. He uncovers it right away, though, when he feels Dean’s hand wrap around the base.

“Hello there,” Dean tells Benny’s dick. It fits nicely in his hand, fingers barely reaching.

“I have regrets,” Benny says.

“No, you don’t,” Dean says, resting his head on Benny’s hip so he can look up at him.

“No,” Benny agrees. “I don’t.” His hands come down to rest tenderly against Dean’s face, and Dean kisses the inside of first one wrist, then the other, before he opens his mouth and swallows Benny’s dick. Benny’s uncut, which Dean has less experience with, but he uses his hand to work the skin over the length of him, takes his time to explore. Benny’s hands disappear until Dean flails around with his free hand to set them lightly at the base of his head, open so they can’t grab.

Dean plays around, seeing how deeply he can take Benny in, but it’s been a while and he’s going to need to spend some time working up to getting his lips to Benny’s root. It’ll take all his focus, too, and right now he’d rather pay attention to the rest of the noises Benny’s making, see what else makes him groan. Dean goes down once more, lingers at the head when he comes up, working at the frenulum and swirling his tongue around the tip before he comes up with a pop. Benny’s hands are still gentle on the back of Dean’s head, but the muscles in his stomach are twitching with the effort of not bucking his hips, which Dean honestly appreciates. Benny’s hands come around to cup Dean’s face, his thumb brushing tenderly over Dean’s swollen lips. Dean kisses the tip of Benny’s dick before he uncurls his hand from around it, and it slaps, leaking, against Benny’s stomach. Dean grins up at Benny, sucks the thumb resting at the corner of his lips into his mouth and bites lightly at the pad of it.

Dean lets Benny’s thumb slip from his mouth as he titles his head. He’s fully intending to get himself acquainted with Benny’s balls, with his inner thighs, with if he’s ticklish, but Benny’s hands pull at his shoulders, encouraging Dean up his body so that Benny can kiss him, deep and messy. Dean rolls his hips, his own dick looking for purchase. He breaks the kiss and sits back, straddling Benny, and reaches for the hem of his own shirt.

Hands catch at his, stopping him. “Let me,” Benny says.

Dean shrugs like it doesn’t matter either way, but his cheeks pink a bit at the idea of Benny unwrapping him. “Okay,” he says, and the room gives a sudden whirl as Benny tumbles them quickly, Dean pressed to the mattress under his weight.

“The things you do to me,” Benny says hungrily, catching the hem of Dean’s shirt and pushing it slowly up. He ducks his head, mouth lowering to Dean’s treasure trail, tongue circling his belly button before dipping inside. He works up Dean’s torso with hands and mouth as he slowly drags the shirt up. He explores the curve of Dean’s ribcage, the way his skin twitches over ribs. He lingers at Dean’s pecs, Dean’s shirt bunched up between his armpits, as he licks one nipple and pulls back to watch it pebble even harder as the saliva evaporates in the cool air.

Dean groans. One of Benny’s hands moves to rest against the side of his dick. Not on it. Dean’s pretty sure this is turnabout. He rolls his hips up into the glancing pressure along the side of it, his tented sweats. A noise that definitely isn’t a whine escapes his mouth without his permission as he thrusts again.

“Sorry, what was that?” Benny asks, hand still just beside his dick, the other curled in the waistband of Dean’s sweats, hooked into the elastic of his boxers.

“Touch me,” Dean grits out through clenched teeth. He swears, if Benny makes him ask again -- but Benny curls his fingers and pulls, stripping Dean’s boxers and sweats in one long movement as Dean pulls his shirt the rest of the way over his head. He lays there, then, naked before Benny’s hungry eyes, getting drunk on the way Benny looks at him.

Benny ducks down, starts working his way down Dean’s body the same way he’d worked his way up it, lips and teeth and dancing fingers than elicit a gasping laugh from the ticklish spot behind Dean’s knee. Dean digs his fingers into the sheets. Benny rubs his beard, teasing, against Dean’s inner thighs. He kisses his way down the sharp bone of his shin. He pushes Dean’s heels over his broad shoulders and works his way back up his other leg, stopping to work a bruise into Dean’s hip as Dean hisses, “yes.”

Finally, he gets to Dean’s poor, abandoned dick. “Why, aren’t you a pretty thing?” Benny says, jacking easily at him.

“You’re -” gasp, pause - “such an asshole,” Dean grits out as Benny licks a slow stripe from the tip of Dean’s dick and down to his scrotum, rolling Dean’s balls in his other hand before he sucks first one, then the other, into his mouth. Dean’s head smacks back into the pillow, and he grasps harder at the sheets.

He gives the head of Dean’s dick a good suck, pulls off. “Naw,” Benny drawls, releasing Dean’s balls, knuckles trailing against Dean’s perineum and past, pad of his thumb pressing softly against the furl of Dean’s hole. “ _This_ is an asshole,” Benny says. His shoulders press Dean’s legs further apart, opening him up, and his finger taps and dances as Dean gasps. Benny stops, pulling back just enough to suck his thumb into his mouth and get it wet before pressing it more firmly at Dean’s hole. It’s enough for a single finger, a slight burn of the best possible kind. It’s been - it’s been longer than Dean wants to think about since he’s had something other than his own fingers or silicone inside of him, and he clenches around it, rocking into it, rocking back against Benny’s hand.

The noise that escapes him when Benny pulls his hand back is definitely a whimper.

“Ain’t going to be able to kiss your mouth for a while,” Benny says, crawling back up Dean’s body to help himself to Dean’s mouth, and Dean’s brain short circuits a bit when he realizes what Benny means. Dean ghosts his hands along Benny’s skull, past his ears, to tangle his fingers at the back of Benny’s neck and pull him even deeper into a kiss. They rut against each other, cocks sliding against each other in precome and saliva.

Eventually, Benny pulls his mouth away, gasping, reaches down to pin Dean’s hips to the bed. “You think you’ve thought of this,” he gasps into Dean’s neck. “I’ve gotta plan,” he says, pressing the heel of his hand to his own dick like he needs a minute and lying there, a heavy weight on Dean until his breathing slows. “Okay,” he says, and pulls back. Dean snags him in for another kiss, two, before Benny starts working his way back down the bed, down Dean.

“You know what, screw your plan,” Dean says, reaching down for Benny and pulling him back up. “Next time, you can spend as long as you want between my thighs. Hell, I’ll sit on your face if you want me to.” He runs his hands through Benny’s hair as Benny looks at him with a raised eyebrow. “But I don’t want--” Kisses Benny, deep and thorough and dirty. Kisses him softer. He doesn’t want to give up Benny’s mouth.

“Next time,” Benny says, like a promise. Kisses the corner of Dean’s lips, hollow of his throat, the scar along his eyebrow. “Lube?”

“Drawer,” Dean says, gesturing vaguely, because there’s no way his legs are going to hold him right now. Benny kisses him again, soft. The mattress shifts as Benny rises.

“Huh,” Benny says after a minute. Dean looks over. The lube is in Benny’s hand, but he’s looking at the rest of Dean’s drawer. Dean thinks about what’s in there - the porn, the toys, and his face starts to color in embarrassment.

Benny shakes his head. “The things I want to do to you,” he says, voice somehow even lower, huskier. “The things I want you to do to me.”

“Yeah,” Dean says. “Okay,” because it looks like of all things, they have time.

Benny’s cock bobs in the air as he walks back to the bed, and it’s objectively funny, but Dean’s mouth is dry at the sight of it. Benny sits on the bed, He grabs a pillow and places it under Dean’s hips to bring them up somewhere comfortable, then he hooks Dean’s thighs and pushes them wide.

“J’ai envie de t’embrasser,” Benny says. Looks at Dean’s exposed hole in a way that makes Dean red in desire and almost embarrassment. Benny leans in and breathes against the sensitive skin, then pulls back to mouth along his inner thigh. Dean’s hands return to gripping the sheets. His hips are still on the pillow, and Benny spreads them wide again, leaning in to kiss around his fluttering hole while he slicks his fingers. Dean’s still loose and messy with saliva, can feel the start of a delicious burn on the skin of his cheeks. One of Benny’s lube-slick fingers slips into him without any issue, slow and thorough in a way that would almost make Dean think he wasn’t desperate for this if he couldn’t feel the iron in the hand pushing his one leg up. Even then, it doesn’t take long before Benny’s slicking himself up.

Dean starts to roll over. Benny stops him with a hand on his leg. “I want to see you,” Benny says, voice low. “That okay?”

Dean swallows. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, that’s good.”

“Come on,” Dean says as Benny lines himself up, the wide head of his dick a steady pressure. Starts to say it again, but it escapes from him in a groan as Benny pushes slowly inside of him. Benny stops once the head of his dick pops in, breathing hard as he stays perfectly, still waiting for Dean to adjust. “Move,” Dean says when he’s ready, and Benny slowly and steadily pushes the rest of the way into him. It feels like it’s an eternity before he’s all the way in, and he stays, kneeling and still, until Dean hooks a leg around Benny’s hips to encourage him to move.

Benny thrusts, gentle, testing, and Dean rolls his eyes and uses his leg to encourage Benny to thrust harder. Dean feels full, needy, hungry. Benny’s fingers are soft against his ribs, the inside of his knee, flexing when Dean clenches his ass experimentally. Benny growls reflexively, just a little, and Dean wonders if he should be worried about the thrill that sends down his spine.

“Come on,” Dean says, reaching up to scramble at Benny’s shoulders and pull him in close. Benny leans down, braces his arms around Dean’s shoulders and gives an experimental thrust, two. “That’s it,” Dean says, and “yeah, there,” as Benny glances against his prostate, then “come on, give it to me,” he groans. Benny kisses Dean’s collarbone, his mouth, his shoulder, his mouth. He comes down to his elbows, fingers twining with Dean’s.

Benny shifts his hips a little, nudges the pillow under Dean’s, and he _thrusts_. Dean sees stars. Benny’s eyes drift closed when his head drops but they always open and come back to Dean. Benny’s the right kind of big - enough to feel after, but not enough to overwhelm everything else. He knows what he’s doing, too, not like some dudes Dean’s been with who just jackrabbit because they think being hung does all the work for them. Dean gasps and pants as Benny moves deep inside of him, glancing past his prostate on every thrust. Benny’s releasing a steady stream of French that sounds by turns filthy and tender. Benny kisses Dean’s throat, his collarbone, the corner of his mouth, catches his earlobe in his teeth, pulls back to watch Dean’s face with an intensity unlike anything Dean has ever experienced. Dean squeezes the fingers laced with his, uses his leg hooked at Benny’s back to urge him harder, faster, faster, until his thrusts turn erratic and he shudders and pulls out just in time to rut against Dean and shoot streaks of white all along his torso.

Benny shudders and collapses, catching his weight on his elbows before coming down on Dean. Dean is empty, turned on, so close to coming, and he rolls his hips against Benny, desperate. There a moment when he thinks he blew Benny’s mind so thoroughly that Benny is going to leave him hanging, but Benny bites Dean’s earlobe. “Don’t you worry, cheri,” he says, and pushes himself back up to settle between Dean’s legs. He wipes his hand through the mess that’s transferred to his chest and then reaches down to wrap it around Dean’s aching dick, hand slick with the precome Dean’s leaking and Benny’s own come. The first couple of strokes are awkward, like he’s still riding out his own orgasm, but it evens out quickly, Benny’s grip the right kind of tight, twisting as he reaches the tip, thumb catching at the head. His other hand slips back inside Dean, two fingers working steadily in and out, and Dean shudders and comes so hard he sees stars.

When he comes to, Benny is wrapped sideways around him, one leg hooked over his to pull him close. He is running his hand up and down Dean’s stomach, his ribs, working their combined come into Dean’s skin.

“Uggg,” Dean says, but Benny is watching the mix of them on Dean’s skin in an intent way, so Dean just says “gross,” and leaves him to it. He’s too tired to complain, anyway. When Benny is satisfied, he shifts again, and so does Dean, and he gets to wrap up in Benny like this now any time he wants. They end up in a slightly awkward pile of limbs, but they’re touching in as many places as possible, trading lazy, open-mouthed kisses, and Dean is tired. His hand is curled protectively around the base of Benny’s neck.

“That a vampire thing?” Dean asks when he’s half-asleep. “You want me to smell like you?”

“Yeah,” Benny says. “A vampire thing,” in a voice that makes Dean think that it’s actually just a Benny thing.

“Whatever,” Dean grumbles, and digs himself in close against Benny’s body, because he can, he gets to.

“I love you,” Benny says, voice low and dark and serious. There’s a long moment before Dean realizes Benny’s waiting for a reply.

Dean cracks an eye at him. “You think I let just anyone rub their come all over me?” he asks.

Benny huffs and settles against him.

“I love you too,” Dean says. Against his shoulder, he can feel Benny smile.

*

Dean wakes up sticky and sore and safe and satiated. Benny’s awake already, kisses his shoulder without intent, lips soft in a way that has to be related to vampire healing and a marked contrast against his beard. “Bonjour, mon cheri,” Benny says.

“Morning,” Deans says, though he was no idea what time of day it is, reaching back over his shoulder to pull Benny’s head closer to him. Benny smiles against Dean’s skin, and he presses his mouth to the knobs of Dean’s spine, his trapezoids. Dean’s fingers tighten in the short hairs at the base of Benny’s skull and the kisses build in intent, lips parting, Benny’s teeth testing the edge of Dean’s shoulderblade, flat of his tongue exploring the dip of his spine.

“I believe there was some talk of my sitting on your face,” Dean says, because his dick is starting to wake up and get with the program. “It’s a rough job, but I made a promise. To let you rim the hell out of me.”

“Your life is so hard,” Benny says. Licks Dean’s ear and laughs when Dean bats him away automatically. “I appreciate your sacrifice.”

“Speaking of hard,” Dean says, twining his fingers with Benny’s and pulling his hand down to press against his hardening dick. He rolls his hips back and can feel Benny’s dick pressed against the swell of his cheeks.

“God, you’re an asshole,” Benny says, laughing, fond, and then before Dean can say anything, “speaking of assholes,” as he presses a dry thumb to the furl of Dean’s hole, resting.

Dean hisses, just a little, a well-used, satisfying kind of sore, and Benny kisses his shoulder again. “Let me kiss it better,” he says, and Dean groans and lets himself be maneuvered onto his front, drawing himself up onto elbows and knees and arching his back as Benny kisses down his spine.

“I just want to remind you,” Benny says, later, picking his head up off the mattress to kiss Dean’s trembling thigh while Dean clings desperately to his headboard, legs aching and as open as he can remember feeling, “that I don’t actually need to breathe.”

“Fuck,” Dean says, because he knows it but he hasn’t considered it, really, controlling his weight and movements like he would with anyone.

“Come on, now,” Benny says, wrapping his hands around Dean’s thighs to encourage him down, down, down.

*

“I need a shower,” Dean says, later, when he can see again and has regained control of his lungs. Benny looks as wrecked as Dean feels. He kind of wants to stay here, boneless, with Benny, but his bladder is starting to feel full and he’s sticky in a way he’s struggling to ignore, covered with lube and saliva and — there is - there is so much come on him. There’s some on Benny and enough on the sheets but it’s mostly on him.

“Mhm,” Benny says tightening his arms around him, and, whatever, Dean guesses it’s not that bad in the grander scheme of things. 

Dean lets himself just kind of drift there, half-awake and with nowhere to be, Benny’s beard against his shoulderblade a grounding presence, until the pressure in his bladder is too much to ignore. He pokes Benny in the ribs until Benny lets him go, grumbling. Benny watches him openly and appreciatively as Dean moves around the room. 

“Mhm,” Benny says as Dean bends over, somewhat gingerly, to snag his dead guy robe from where it’s been knocked to the floor. “Is that really necessary?” Benny asks as Dean picks the robe up.

“Don’t want to traumatize Charlie if they’re back,” Dean says. He takes a breath and waits to see if mentioning Charlie, mentioning the world outside of this room, is going to send a flight of disquiet or panic through him, is going to make him awkward, but he - he feels the same. Then- “Are you pouting?” Dean asks as he shrugs the robe over his shoulders. 

Benny grins, rolls his shoulder. “I was enjoying the view.”

Dean snorts. 

Benny leers shamelessly. “What can I say? I’m a dirty old man.”

“Cold shower might help you clean that up,” Dean says. 

“I can think of something else that would help,” Benny says, stretching his arms wide along the headboard and waggling his eyebrows without any real intent.

“A cold shower by yourself,” Dean says, batting fondly at Benny’s foot sticking out from beneath the blankets. “Because I am closed for business.” He’s the good kind of sore right now, but long experience has taught him that another go will take him over the edge. Ten years ago, hell, five years ago he’d probably have gone for it anyway. 

A shower together sounds incredibly tempting, but even though there’s no way Dean’s going to be ready to go again he’s equally unlikely to be able to keep his hands to himself. While Sam or someone walking in on them would preempt the awkward conversations Dean knows he’s going to have to have at some point, he’s reasonably certain that Sam would turn into a freaking drama queen about being exposed to that many wet dicks in a communal shower. 

(And Dean - Dean knows that Sam and Benny have been cool for ages. He’s even about 98% certain they’re cool enough that this, that Dean and Benny isn’t going to be an issue. But there’s that 2%, that 2% where Dean can feel the handcuffs holding him to a radiator, can hear Sam claiming that Dean keeps trying to feed himself to monsters, that makes Dean want to ensure Sam finds out somewhere Dean doesn’t have to fight him soaking wet and with his dick out.)

“All right,” Benny says. Reaches out as if to reel Dean in, but he just ties the belt of Dean’s robe for him. “I need to eat anyway,” Benny says. He gives Dean a friendly swat on the ass as Dean turns to leave. 

“You’re going to pay for that, you know,” Dean says. 

Benny, sprawled on Dean’s bed, arms spread wide and blankets pooled low on his stomach and looking for all the world like he belongs there, grins. “Why in the hell else do you think I did it?”

*

This should be weirder, Dean thinks as he turns on the shower. This should be weirder, he thinks as he tests the spray. Weirder that he and Benny are on the same page when they hadn’t even realized they were reading the same book. He wonders if Benny’s freaking out. Dean feels like _he_ should be. Instead, he just turns his face into the hot, stinging spray of water and lets it beat away where he’s sore. He presses absently at the beginnings of an oblong bruise at the bottom of his ribs, unsure if it’s from Benny or the preta. He’s not sure if it really matters, or if Benny’s becoming part of his DNA in the same way hunting has.

Dean has a fresh t-shirt pulled over his head and is toweling his hair when he smells smoke. There’s a brief, frantic moment where he thinks _that’s what you get for letting your guard down_ , but when he rounds the corner to the kitchen what he sees is Charlie tilting a pan into the sink and batting at smoke in the air with her free hand. 

“Hi!” She chirps when she sees Dean. Like if she’s cheerful enough Dean won’t ask any questions. 

“What,” Dean says, waving his hand open hand at the scene before him. The bowl of pancake batter on the counter, lumpy rivulets running down the side. A stack of dark, oddly shaped pancakes on a plate on the table. The smoke spiraling up towards the ceiling and curling around a handful of orange, yellow, and green party balloons that have been taped to the brick wall.

“Surprise?” Charlie offers, arms out in surrender as she puts the pan back on the stove. It sizzles a bit, and Dean darts in and moves it to a burner that’s off. 

The batter isn’t too bad once he thins it out a bit with milk and whisks it again. He thinks of the part of his brain that said _this is what you get_ and feels silly. 

“This one has to be a letter ‘a,’” Charlie says, perched up on the counter and watching intently as he throws butter into the pan, now at the right temperature. 

“The hell does it need to be an A for, that much edge and you lose the fluffy inside,” Dean grumbles, but pours it out into the requested shape. 

“Reasons,” Charlie says, and hops off the counter to go do - something, he’s not sure what, but he stops her with the spatula.

“No, you’re going to do this,” he says, and waits for her to grab the spatula. He nods at the pan. “Wait until it starts to bubble, then flip. Be careful, the shape means they’ll burn easily.”

Dean steps back and realizes as he does so that someone has cleaned up the shattered glass on the floor and a sinking feeling shoots through him. Especially when he remembers how close Charlie’s room is to his.

He takes a closer look at the plate of pancakes and realizes that they aren’t misshapen - or aren’t just misshapen - and are actually a stack of letters. 

“Plate!” Charlie calls and Dean hands it over to her, watching as she pours a ‘T’ out into the pan. 

“Charlie,” Dean says slowly, “Why are you making pancakes that spell ‘congratulations?’”

Charlie snorts. “Because ‘took you long enough’ had too many letters.”

Dean opens his mouth. Closes it. There are a lot of things he wants to say, including _there’s only a two letter difference_ but what comes out is “Wait, did you try to make me cook my own congratulations pancakes?”

”I tried to make sure you had edible congratulations pancakes,” Charlie said, pointing the spatula at him. 

Dean stares at the pancake in the pan for a long time. Watches bubbles start to rise to the surface. “Flip,” he says, but Charlie is already moving. “What -“ Dean stops, mouth dry - “what if it was a one-time thing, or it had gone badly, or-“

“Plate,” Charlie says, deliberately, disrupting his train of thought. She transfers the pancake. Pours out a ‘U’. She shakes her head. “That was never going to happen.”

“It could have,” Dean says. 

“Did it?” Charlie asks. 

“No,” Dean says, and lets himself smile. “You’re the smart one,” he says, and kisses her head. “I should listen to you more often.”

“I find your lack of faith disturbing,” Charlie says, and “plate.”

Dean holds out the plate for the pancake. “Have you talked to Parisa yet?” he asks. He should probably try to figure out what day it is.

Charlie shakes her head. “Not yet. I’m going tomorrow. Come with me?” she asks. “I could use a bit of proof.”

“Of course,” Benny says from somewhere over Dean’s shoulder. 

“Hey,” Dean says, turning to face Benny. He wonders if it’s going to be weird, looking at him, if it’s going to feel like something else, but he’s still Benny. Dean feels the skin around his eyes crease. Benny smiles back at him.

“Hey,” Kevin says, wandering in and handing Dean a bundle of herbs and a folded sheet of paper. “Charlie asked me to make this up for you,” he says, hovering nearby. 

Dean unfolds the paper - parchment, actually - and looks at it. Benny, reading it over Dean’s shoulder, flushes in a way that Dean didn't actually know was possible with the lower blood flow, because it’s definitely a silencing spell they can carve into the door. 

It takes Dean a moment to realize that Kevin’s still standing there with one hand up, waiting for a high five. “Nice,” Kevin says.

Dean grins proudly and high fives the hell out of Kevin, because, yeah, nice. And hell, look what - who - Dean is nailing down, and hell yeah they made each other loud and they will again. 

Kevin nods at him. Then says “Ooooh, pancakes.” 

Benny mutters something in French as he sits down at the table that Dean is choosing to believe is an expression of adoration and not exasperation.

“Don’t pretend like you didn’t know what you were getting into,” Charlie says she smacks Kevin’s hand away with the spatula. 

“More like _who_ you’re getting into,” Kevin says.

Dean high fives him again. 

“Oh good lord,” Benny says, and lets his head drops to the table.

“She’s not wrong,” Dean says. He lets his hand rest at the bared nape of Benny’s neck, feeling it as Benny tries to contain the laughter in his shaking shoulders. "You knew."

“I have regrets,” Benny says.

Dean rubs his back. “No,” he says. “You don’t.”

*

“What are the congratulations pancakes for?” Sam asks when he walks into the kitchen, later.

“Not dying,” Dean says around a mouthful of maple syrup and pancakes.

*

It’s not that Dean doesn’t want to tell Sam. He does. It just - never seems like the right time, somehow. He even takes Sam out to the bar with the express intent of telling him while he has his mouth full of alcohol, but then Sam orders a Jefferson Reserve and it feels like a shame to waste it.

Once he gets as far as “Hey, Sam,” before a werewolf fly tackles him. Another time, a ghost throws him out a window before he gets further than “we need to talk.” Dean doesn't even have a chance to open his mouth before a sobbing girl hammers on their motel room door, yelling a confession of accidental witchcraft.

*

If the universe is that hell-bent on helping Dean avoid an awkward conversation, maybe he’ll just let Sam figure it out on his own.

Sam gets a TV. He gets some furniture. 

“We could watch a movie sometime,” Sam says, awkwardly, over supper one night, out of nowhere.

Dean blinks at him in confusion. “Okay,” he says, slowly. “Like, at a theatre, or--”

“Wait,” Charlie says. “Were you building a living room so that you could ask us to do a movie night without intruding?”

“We have a living room now?” Dean asks.

“... yes?” Kevin says. “Which you’d know if you weren’t spending so much time in your room.” He pauses, significantly. “Reading.”

Dean smiles in a way that he hopes tells Kevin he’s dangerously close to getting his bed shortsheeted and filled with frogs for the rest of time.

Benny grins. “You know how he loves to get into a good book.”

“Yes,” Sam tells Charlie.

“That’s sweet,” she says.

“You could invite Parisa,” Dean says. Parisa was viciously glad they’d gotten the thing that had killed Ryan. Had needed a bit of time to get used to the idea of the sigils Charlie and Dean had painted behind the pictures on her walls as she muttered about her deposit. To the weird smoke Benny had wafted as he muttered in Latin. She’s getting there, though.

It probably says something about how distracted Dean was by trying to figure out how to talk to his brother than he fails to notice what Sam was actually doing, which was setting up a whole-ass living room.

Yeah, maybe he’ll just let Sam figure it out by himself, Dean decides, before deliberately falling asleep on Benny’s shoulder during some subtitled bullshit that Sam and Parisa had ganged up to subject them to.

Sam doesn’t even blink. 

Dean’s going to need to reevaluate some things.

*

The thing is, there’s never going to be any such thing as a perfect time. Dean knows this. Benny seems like he’s cool with it, but Dean knows it’s a shitty thing to do to him. He’s going to tell Sam after this current case, Dean decides. He’s definitely doing to do it as soon as they’re done here.

Instead, what happens is that while he and Sam are clearing out a nest of some kind of weird praying mantis things, standing back to back with blades up and bug goop splashed across their faces, Dean blurts out “Benny’s in love with me.”

“Not sure,” Sam says, swinging his arm to decapitate a praying mantis thing, “this is the right time?”

“Never a right time,” Dean says, dropping under a swinging arm with serrated edges and popping up on the other side of the drone, near the queen.

“True,” Sam says, picking up the serrated forearm of a fallen drone. “But --” he cuts himself off as he uses the arm to swing at another creature.

“Yeah,” Dean sputters, breath knocked out of him as the queen slams him back against the wall. “Point,” he says, pushing the queen’s head back at a sharp angle so that Sam can nail her between the eyes with a consecrated knife dipped in RAID for good measure. 

“So,” Sam says, as all the drones fall dramatically to the floor, huge creatures crashing down around them in a clittering of chitin. 

“So,” Dean says, wiping the insect goop from his face with the sleeve of his coat.

“Were - were you not aware that Benny was in love with you?” Sam asks delicately as he yanks his knife out of the queen’s head. 

“Benny and I are - we’re whatever,” Dean says, then narrows his eyes at what Sam just said. “Wait.”

Sam pinches his nose in consternation. “Okay,” he says. “Okay, let’s not go there. Let’s start again.” He takes a deep breath. Wipes his knife off on the fabric of one of the felted hats some of the drones were wearing for some unknown reason. “Is this what you want?” Sam asks.

“Yeah,” Dean says, and he’s not surprised to find he means it. He starts upending the gas cylinder all over the edges of the room. “Yeah, I want this,” he says, and “I really do,” and strikes a match.

“Okay, good,” Sam says, brushing off an ember or two as the two of them exit the warehouse. It burns behind them as they head across the grass towards the others. Kevin and Charlie are arguing loudly about Katamari Damacy, having already burned up the escape tunnels. Benny has his arms crossed on top of the Impala, chin cushioned there. He’s watching Kevin and Charlie until his eyes cut over to Sam and Dean, watching Dean carefully, like he’s checking his gait for signs of injuries. 

“I think I’m happy,” Dean says, like it’s some kind of revelation. 

Sam looks over at their friends. “I think - I think I might be, too,” he says. 

“Good,” Dean says. He looks at Benny and he smiles. “Let’s go home,” he says, and clasps a hand to Sam’s shoulder as they walk back to the car.


	5. Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know I said this was only going to be four chapters, but I also once thought this fic was going to be seven thousand words in total. An unexpected epilogue really shouldn't have been _that_ unexpected to me.

“I’d like to do the 101 sometime,” Dean says. Casually. Dean’s resting his back against the arm of the couch as he reads. His socked feet are in Benny’s lap, one of Benny’s hands resting easily across the out-turned arch of Dean’s foot, his heel. Dean’s been looking for a hunt out that way, looking for an excuse to do part of the Pacific Coast Highway, and he realizes, finally, that he doesn’t need an excuse. He wants to see the redwoods. He wants Benny to get a chance to look at the sea. He’s got a list of reasons, a list of justifications.

“Yeah,” Benny says. Thumb playing softly, back and forth, along Dean's ankle. “I’d be up for that.”

“Oh,” Dean says. Feels off-balance. “Okay,” he says. Dean coughs. “Good, then.”

Benny squeezes his foot.

*

They stop one night in some nameless park, pull off the main road to find an open, empty clearing. They’re far enough out that the sky is, at least to Dean, clear of city glow and light pollution. There’s no moon to wash out the night, so the only light comes from the stars.

“Are there as many stars as you remember?” Dean asks. Feels like there are more than he’s ever seen.

“Give me a minute to count,” Benny says, hip pressed against Dean’s as they sit on the trunk and look at the sky.

Yeah, Dean’s looking at the stars, at the depth and spill of the Milky Way, but more than that he watches Benny watching them. He thinks about that first night after Sam pulled Benny back out of Purgatory, finding Benny standing in the long grass and looking up at the stars, looking entirely lost. Dean was afraid to look away from him, like he might disappear. Afraid to look back to make sure Benny was following him, afraid Benny would vanish back into the underworld. 

“They have these dark sky parks,” Dean says. “We could go sometime. If you wanted. If when you finish counting, some are missing.” 

“Yeah,” Benny says, turning his face from the sky to Dean. Benny looks nothing like he did then, looks solid and certain. “Yeah, I’d like that.”

They sleep in the Impala that night, Dean falling asleep chilled, listening to Benny’s voice rise and fall as he talks about constellations. Wakes up warm, Benny’s coat tucked in around him.

*

In Portland, Dean drags Benny into Voodoo Doughnut. Benny sighs, long-suffering, as they stand in a winding line along the brick building in Old Town, but his mouth twists fondly as Dean bounces on the balls of his feet in the spring drizzle.

The inside of the shop is a riot of color against the grey day outside. Dean cackles a little as he picks out donuts with pentagrams and voodoo doll donuts with pretzel stakes. He rolls his eyes at tourists taking photos, but snaps a pic of a donut called Gay Bar. It’s white-frosted and has a rainbow flag of fruit loops down the middle. Dean texts it to Sam with _tell your mesh shirt I said hi_. Benny groans audibly as Dean’s eyes light up at the sight of a predictably-shaped, triple-cream filled one straight-up called cock-n-balls.

Benny sighs. “You’re going to make me watch you eat that in front of me in public, aren’t you?”

“Obviously,” Dean says, already gesturing for the goth behind the counter in a dark apron to put one in the hot pink box. “We’d both be disappointed if I didn’t.”

The guy behind the counter looks impossibly young to Dean, but he’s entirely unfazed. Dean supposes he’s probably used to it. 

“Ain’t a donut in the world that can beat a half-decent beignet,” Benny grumbles, but they eat the entire box as they wander along the bank of the Williamette River.

*

“I’m not kissing you until you brush your teeth, if you eat that,” Dean says, leaning against the front bumper of the Impala outside of an open-air farmer’s market Benny insisted they stop at. Benny’s got a bag of salmon candy tucked under his arm, and, _what_.

“Good thing I picked it up for Sam, then,” Benny says. 

Dean wrinkles his nose but lets Benny step in to kiss him. Which turns out to be a mistake, because he has apparently been into the weird, salted, handmade licorice candy Dean picked up for Kevin at a hippy-dippy gas station outside of Boise. 

“Gross,” Dean says, pulling back and letting his face screw up. Benny laughs and kisses him again, a quick, dry press of the lips to the corner of his jaw. “Yeah, yeah, whatever,” Dean says, waving one hand dismissively, the other curling around Benny’s neck to tug him into a quick half-hug. 

“Nice sunglasses,” Benny says, voice bone dry, gesturing at the pair tucked into the half-open neck of Dean’s henley.

“Thinking about trying out a new look,” Dean says, slipping them on. They look like something a 1950s accountant would wear, heavy plastic up top and thin metal around the bottom. Except the tops are burnt orange and the lenses the metal support are ambered brown. He picked them out while he was browsing the flea market tucked at the corner of the farmer’s market, thinking of Charlie’s small mountain of absolutely ludicrous sunglasses.

“Looks real good,” Benny says. “You should consider rebuilding your entire wardrobe around them.”

Dean laughs, and they slip into the car.

“What’s this?” Benny asks, seeing the dusty box sitting on the front seat between them.

“Nothing much,” Dean says with a shrug. “Take a look.”

Benny lifts the lid off, and his face flickers a bit. Dean holds his breath, not sure if he got this right. Benny’s hands go soft and he gently runs his fingers along the spines of the tape cases inside, plastic tink of the shifting plastic filling the front seat of the car. “Dean,” Benny says, voice thick. 

“Thought you might like to hear some of what you missed,” Dean says. And then, with a casualness he’s been practicing in his head, “you’re right, the Old Man doesn’t get to take your love of music as well.”

They take the I-5, then the I-4 along the Columbia River, view flickering between temperate rainforest and the wide, braided expanse of the river and deltas and islands.

While they drive he lets Benny sort through the tapes, inserting them into the deck seemingly at random, so the music that fills the car varies wildly in genre and age and recording quality, some offering little more than a garbled hiss. Sometimes Dean exercises a rapid veto, other times Benny ejects them in disgust. They argue about Hendrix’s National Anthem until Benny finally says, _look, I can see where you’re coming from with the purposeful discordance but it still sounds like a cat trying to get out of a washing machine to me._

They follow the Columbia through Washington and then Dean puts them on the Astoria-Megler bridge to cross it. The bridge is four miles long, starts off low and close to waters too shallow for boats to navigate. 

“We called this entire area, up through Vancouver Island, the Graveyard of the Pacific,” Benny says. Looking out the window at the relatively calm water around them, smaller waves smoothed with speed. “Shifting sandbars, tidal rips, reefs. Easy to get lost, get caught, crash. We capsized once ourselves, my first tour around the Americas with them.”

“Shit,” Dean says. Thinks about the deck going out from under you, water rushing in. Everyone who’s been to Hell knows what it feels like to drown. “At least you don’t have to breathe?” he offers.

Benny laughs. “True,” he says. “We lost a man that day, swept out to sea. I wonder, sometimes, if he’s still just - floating out there somewhere, starving.”

“Shit,” Dean says again. And: “I’m sorry,” because vamp or not, that’s grim.

Benny snorts. “Don’t be. Hammond was a vicious piece of work.”

Dean pauses. There’s something in Benny’s voice. “You wouldn’t have had anything to do with his going overboard, would you?”

“No idea what you’re talking about,” Benny says, but he grins as the river continues to fly by beneath them.

Closer to Astoria, the bridge starts to rise, through-trusses caging in around them and flickering by as water plays out in below them, sharp rise of the span feeling a little like taking flight.

*

Dean settles Baby south on the 101. It’s a two-lane, no median. Winds through hills, cuts straight through scraped-back walls of stone crowned with cedars and spruces, but always comes back to the ocean.

Dean knows right away that going north to south was the right call. It puts their lane right up against the ocean as the highway and yellow dividing line weave with the coast, as the waves crash against rock and sand. He cracks his window, just a bit, so that he can smell a hint of the ocean spray.

Benny goes a little seafood crazy with access to the fresh stuff. He orders off menus seemingly at random, but based on what he later admits to Dean is what smells like its freshest off the boat. 

Dean shakes his head. “I feel like you think you’re getting back at me for the donut thing with the oysters, but I gotta tell you, it’s not doing it for me.”

“ _I_ feel like you’re dramatically overestimating how sexy that was,” Benny says.

“Hey, you jumped me,” Dean says.

Benny picks up another half-shell from its nest on ice. “I pretty much always want to jump you,” he says. 

“I am pretty irresistible,” Dean preens. Poses a bit. “What’s up with the aphrodisiacs, then?”

“I’m not finding it too hard to resist you right now,” Benny says. Rolls his eyes and tilts his head back to swallow another oyster. Dean flutters his eyelashes, coy, runs his booted foot up Benny’s calf under the table and then drops it to the floor, snickering.

“See, that right there is why I need the aphrodisiacs,” Benny says, eyes wrinkling in a smile. 

Dean steals an oyster entirely on principle.

*

“Wait, is that a puffin?” Dean asks. “And a penguin?” He squints. “Wait, no, penguins definitely can’t fly.”

“That’s a murre,” Benny says. He’s squinting a little, too, but it appears to be more muscle memory than any actual attempt to see better. “And a puffin, yeah.”

Now that’s Dean’s looking for them he can see more, can pick out the orange beaks of puffins, the stubby, ungainly silhouette of the murres against longer, graceful wingspans of other seabirds. 

“It’s a whole-ass colony,” Dean says. 

Haystack Rock, with its seabirds bobbing in lazy rolling circles, is probably the most impressive thing about the beach before them, which is saying something. 

It’s a cool, blustery day with roiling clouds flecked gunmetal and shot through with frost white that matches the caps of the waves. They crash against the pillars of stone that rise from the ocean, slowly whittling them down or carving them into intricate shapes. Past them, you can literally see the curvature of the earth, waves smoothed by distance. The mirror of water left on the sand by retreating waves reflects the sky.

Dean shivers a little in the wind, in the spray of mist, but it’s bracing. Benny leans against him as they stare out at it. Dean licks his lips and tastes salt. 

Haystack Rock stands in the ocean tide, hundreds of feet tall. Dean thinks about Loveland Pass, about the time-carved rocks of the San Rafael Swell, about the continental plates that collide, about standing on the edge of one where the ground beneath you dives and the water rushes in. He leans into Benny’s shoulder.

“Let’s take a walk,” Benny says. 

“Yeah,” Dean says. “That sounds nice.”

Dean digs his hands into his pockets against the wind and they walk, shoulders and hips sometimes bumping familiarly as their steps wobble in the damp sand. 

Later, Dean will crank the heat in the Impala, fan his fingers and turn his face into the hot air blowing from vents that still rattle with army men. Benny will reach out a hand to cup Dean’s cheek, and his hand will feel hot against Dean’s chilled skin.

Later, they’ll stop for the night at a random motel, and when they walk in there will be only one bed. “Whatever will we dooooooo,” Dean will say as Benny bounces him back onto the bed; later Benny will whisper _je t’aime, je t’aime_ as Dean gasps it back and they move together in the dark. 

Later, Dean will remember to gripe about the sand from their boots getting all over Baby’s floorboards and into her crevasses. 

That’s all later, though. Now, they walk, shoulders brushing, and watch the waves crash, recede, rush back in, water returning again and again to the continental shelf, to the coastline, to the beach before them. Watch as time and tide reshape the edges of the continent itself, slowly and inextricably building it into something new.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That's it! That's all! I just want to once again thank sweetestdrain and Killa. Killa was wonderful enough to check over the travelogue she had experience with. Sweetestdrain is an absolutely stellar beta who really went above and beyond on this one. 
> 
> And a hearty thank you to you, readers! Thank you so much for sticking with me all the way through this. I appreciate you.


End file.
